Kylie Minogue's Kylie 9781501382987, 9781501382970, 9781501383014, 9781501383007

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Kylie

33 1/3 Global 33 1/3 Global, a series related to but independent from 33 1/3, takes the format of the original series of short, music-based books and brings the focus to music throughout the world. With initial volumes focusing on Japanese and Brazilian music, the series will also include volumes on the popular music of Australia/Oceania, Europe, Africa, the Middle East and more.

33 1/3 Japan Series Editor: Noriko Manabe Spanning a range of artists and genres — from the 1970s rock of Happy End to technopop band Yellow Magic Orchestra, the Shibuyakei of Cornelius, classic anime series Cowboy Bebop, J-Pop/EDM hybrid Perfume, and vocaloid star Hatsune Miku — 33 1/3 Japan is a series devoted to in-depth examination of Japanese popular music of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Published Titles: Supercell’s Supercell by Keisuke Yamada Yoko Kanno’s Cowboy Bebop Soundtrack by Rose Bridges Perfume’s Game by Patrick St. Michel Cornelius’s Fantasma by Martin Roberts Joe Hisaishi’s My Neighbor Totoro: Soundtrack by Kunio Hara Shonen Knife’s Happy Hour by Brooke McCorkle Nenes’ Koza Dabasa by Henry Johnson Yuming’s The 14th Moon by Lasse Lehtonen Forthcoming Titles: Yellow Magic Orchestra’s Yellow Magic Orchestra by Toshiyuki Ohwada Kohaku utagassen: The Red and White Song Contest by Shelley Brunt

33 1/3 Brazil Series Editor: Jason Stanyek Covering the genres of samba, tropicália, rock, hip hop, forró, bossa nova, heavy metal and funk, among others, 33 1/3 Brazil is a series

devoted to in-depth examination of the most important Brazilian albums of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Published Titles: Caetano Veloso’s A Foreign Sound by Barbara Browning Tim Maia’s Tim Maia Racional Vols. 1 &2 by Allen Thayer João Gilberto and Stan Getz’s Getz/Gilberto by Brian McCann Gilberto Gil’s Refazenda by Marc A. Hertzman Dona Ivone Lara’s Sorriso Negro by Mila Burns Milton Nascimento and Lô Borges’s The Corner Club by Jonathon Grasse Racionais MCs’ Sobrevivendo no Inferno by Derek Pardue Naná Vasconcelos’s Saudades by Daniel B. Sharp Chico Buarque’s First Chico Buarque by Charles A. Perrone Forthcoming titles: Jorge Ben Jor’s África Brasil by Frederick J. Moehn

33 1/3 Europe Series Editor: Fabian Holt Spanning a range of artists and genres, 33 1/3 Europe offers engaging accounts of popular and culturally significant albums of Continental Europe and the North Atlantic from the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Published Titles: Darkthrone’s A Blaze in the Northern Sky by Ross Hagen Ivo Papazov’s Balkanology by Carol Silverman Heiner Müller and Heiner Goebbels’s Wolokolamsker Chaussee by Philip V. Bohlman Modeselektor’s Happy Birthday! by Sean Nye Mercyful Fate’s Don’t Break the Oath by Henrik Marstal Bea Playa’s I’ll Be Your Plaything by Anna Szemere and András Rónai Various Artists’ DJs do Guetto by Richard Elliott Czesław Niemen’s Niemen Enigmatic by Ewa Mazierska and Mariusz Gradowski

Massada’s Astaganaga by Lutgard Mutsaers Los Rodriguez’s Sin Documentos by Fernán del Val and Héctor Fouce Édith Piaf’s Récital 1961 by David Looseley Nuovo Canzoniere Italiano’s Bella Ciao by Jacopo Tomatis Iannis Xenakis’ Persepolis by Aram Yardumian Forthcoming Titles: Amália Rodrigues’s Amália at the Olympia by Lila Ellen Gray Ardit Gjebrea’s Projekt Jon by Nicholas Tochka Vopli Vidopliassova’s Tantsi by Maria Sonevytsky

33 1/3 Oceania Series Editors: Jon Stratton (senior editor) and Jon Dale (specializing in books on albums from Aotearoa/New Zealand) Spanning a range of artists and genres from Australian Indigenous artists to Maori and Pasifika artists, from Aotearoa/New Zealand noise music to Australian rock, and including music from Papua and other Pacific islands, 33 1/3 Oceania offers exciting accounts of albums that illustrate the wide range of music made in the Oceania region. Published Titles: John Farnham’s Whispering Jack by Graeme Turner The Church’s Starfish by Chris Gibson Regurgitator’s Unit by Lachlan Goold and Lauren Istvandity Kylie Minogue’s Kylie by Adrian Renzo and Liz Giuffre Forthcoming Titles: Ed Kuepper’s Honey Steel’s Gold by John Encarnacao Alastair Riddell’s Space Waltz by Ian Chapman The Dead C’s Clyma est mort by Darren Jorgensen Chain’s Toward the Blues by Peter Beilharz Bic Runga’s The Drive by Henry Johnson The Front Lawn’s Songs from the Front Lawn by Matthew Bannister Hilltop Hoods’ The Calling by Dianne Rodger Hunters & Collectors’s Human Frailty by Jon Stratton Screamfeeder’s Kitten Licks by Ben Green and Ian Rogers Luke Rowell’s Buy Now Michael Brown

Kylie Adrian Renzo and Liz Giuffre

Series Editors: Jon Stratton, UniSA Creative, University of South Australia, and Jon Dale, University of Melbourne, Australia

BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC Bloomsbury Publishing Inc 1385 Broadway, New York, NY 10018, USA 50 Bedford Square, London, WC1B 3DP, UK 29 Earlsfort Terrace, Dublin 2, Ireland BLOOMSBURY, BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published in the United States of America 2023 Copyright © Adrian Renzo and Liz Giuffre, 2023 For legal purposes the Acknowledgements on p.viii constitute an extension of this copyright page. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. Bloomsbury Publishing Inc does not have any control over, or responsibility for, any third-party websites referred to or in this book. All internet addresses given in this book were correct at the time of going to press. The author and publisher regret any inconvenience caused if addresses have changed or sites have ceased to exist, but can accept no responsibility for any such changes. Whilst every effort has been made to locate copyright holders the publishers would be grateful to hear from any person(s) not here acknowledged. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Renzo, Adrian, author. | Giuffre, Liz, author. Title: Kylie / Adrian Renzo and Liz Giuffre. Description: [1.] | New York : Bloomsbury Academic, 2023. | Series: 33 1/3 Oceania | Includes bibliographical references and index. | Summary: “Discusses Kylie Minogue’s reception by critics as “too formulaic” or “too commercial,” and interrogates the way that commercial pop albums are remembered in both the popular music press and in academic research”– Provided by publisher.  Identifiers: LCCN 2022028618 (print) | LCCN 2022028619 (ebook) | ISBN 9781501382987 (hardback) | ISBN 9781501382970 (paperback) | ISBN 9781501382994 (epub) | ISBN 9781501383007 (pdf) | ISBN 9781501383014 (ebook other)  Subjects: LCSH: Minogue, Kylie. Kylie. | Popular music–Australia–1981–1990– History and criticism. Classification: LCC ML420.M527 R46 2023  (print) | LCC ML420.M527  (ebook) | DDC 782.42164092–dc23/eng/20220621 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022028618 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022028619 ISBN: HB: 978-1-5013-8298-7 PB: 978-1-5013-8297-0 ePDF: 978-1-5013-8300-7 eBook: 978-1-5013-8299-4 Typeset by Integra Software Services Pvt. Ltd. Series: 33 1/3 Oceania To find out more about our authors and books visit www.bloomsbury.com and sign up for our newsletters.

­­Contents Acknowledgements  viii Introduction  1 K – Kinda Girlie, Kinda Gay  15 Y – Young  31 L – Long Player  49 I – Industry  71 E – Endurance  89 Outro  107 References  112 Index  124

Acknowledgements Adrian Renzo and Liz Giuffre acknowledge that this work was researched and written on the lands of the Gadigal people of the Eora nation and the Wallumattagal people of the Darug nation, who we acknowledge as the Traditional Custodians of their Country. We pay our respects to First Nations people who have long made, shared, listened to and learned from music on these lands, and acknowledge that these are lands that were never ceded. Adrian and Liz would also like to acknowledge and thank the series editors, Jon Stratton and Jon Dale, for their initiative and encouragement in this series; Dom Romeo for his kind and swift attention as the book’s ‘first full reader’; as well as, of course, Kylie Minogue herself for the persistence she has continued to show since this first ground-breaking release. Finally, we would each like to acknowledge our families and the support they have given us – support we feel just as strongly now as we did way back when this album was released. We have been, and still are, so lucky, lucky, lucky.

­Introduction This is a whole book about Kylie by Kylie Minogue. Just Minogue’s first album – not the single with Nick Cave, not the video with the hot pants, not the album after Michael Hutchence ‘corrupted’ her. This is a book about the album that featured ‘The Loco-motion’, ‘I Should Be So Lucky’ and ‘Got to Be Certain’. This is a book about an album that was led by a woman and drew international attention to Australian popular music. Remarkably for the 1980s, the album did this without references to vegemite sandwiches or blokes with crocodiles. Kylie Minogue’s self-titled debut album produced a perfect storm of hits and controversy. The then-soap-andchildren’s-television star ‘crossed over’ to music with hit writer/producers Stock, Aitken and Waterman (SAW), and the shameless commercial approach of all involved saw the ‘real’ music industry get its back up. In the UK, it was released on Waterman’s record label PWL Records (Pete Waterman Limited), and in Australia it was released on Mushroom Records. Often referred to as Australia’s answer to Madonna, Minogue was one of the PWL stable’s biggest stars. Since this first album Minogue has released another fourteen albums over three decades, with her fifteenth album, Disco, released in 2020, marking her fourth decade of music production. She has also won seventeen Australian Recording Industry Awards (ARIA), three BRIT Awards, two MTV and MTV Europe awards and a Grammy; featured in the closing ceremony of the Sydney 2000 Olympics; played the ‘legends’ stage at Glastonbury; received an OBE, an OA and

an honorary doctorate for services beyond music – raising awareness and money for breast cancer research. At the time of its release, Kylie went six times platinum in the UK as well as achieving huge success in Australia. The US market was also receptive, making her one of the few solo Australian female artists to ever break there (save perhaps for the equally clean-cut and screen-friendly Olivia Newton-John). The first single from the album, a cover of Little Eva’s ‘The Locomotion’ (retitled simply ‘Locomotion’), went to Number One in Australia, and a PWL re-recording of it (which re-added the hyphen, ‘The Loco-motion’) reached Number One in the UK, Belgium, Finland, Ireland, Israel, Japan, Hong Kong and South Africa, and Number Three in the United States. The next single from the album, the original ‘I Should Be So Lucky’, was Number One in the UK (for five weeks), Australia (six weeks), Germany and Japan. The National Film and Sound Archive of Australia calls her ‘the highest selling Australian-born artist of all time’ (NFSA 2020: online).

Kylie Minogue’s Kylie

Think the internet invented revolting reviews? Think again

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Dear Amazon reader, Google books scroller and general online lurker – think your reviews are brutal? In 1987 and 1988 being critical of Kylie Minogue was a national sport. It wasn’t enough to just ignore Minogue and her music if you didn’t like it; you had to demonstrate your disdain loudly. Some did this in the streets with ‘I HATE KYLIE’ T-shirts (Smash Hits 1988: 10), while the press took it to another level. British radio DJ John Peel is said to have ‘interviewed a cardboard cutout of Kylie, claiming

­Introductio

that it had more personality’ (Wark 1999: 84), while Daily Mail journalist Jean Rook claimed Minogue wasn’t up to the pace, saying she looked like she had ‘just crawled out of a kangaroo’s pouch’ (Rook in Oram 1988: 72) and was in danger of becoming ‘a burnt-out old crocodile handbag’ (Rook in Oram 1988: 72). Reviews of Kylie from 1986 to 1987 are some of the most vicious that we have seen – and many of these appeared before the record was even released. For example, in a review of the press release announcing her album, a reviewer for the Sydney Morning Herald wrote, ‘[i]n the best traditions of television self-importance, the Minogue publicity machine says she “oozes personality”; but it doesn’t say whether she can sing’ (Kent 1987: 22). In the same piece Kent called Minogue ‘rather fetching’ but was clearly dismissive of her beyond this, saying ‘The “Most Popular Female Talent” Logie winner has titled her debut single “Locomotion”. The flip side, sounding equally banal, is “Glad to be Alive”.’ He sneeringly added: ‘[W]hy she has decided to risk overreaching herself by adding a recording career to her acting is not certain’ (Kent 1987: 22). By the time the singles and album were actually released the reviews became even worse. Critics and journalists generally have been unnecessarily harsh in their coverage of Minogue. When covering Minogue’s press conference after a triumphant European tour, a Sydney Morning Herald writer repeatedly called Minogue the ‘Singing Budgie’ before saying, ‘all she [Minogue] wanted to do was kiss the tarmac on her return, though some lovers of fine music have cruelly suggested that she do so in the path of a descending jumbo’ (Dennis 1988b: 32). Death wishes aside (yes, that was a mainstream newspaper printing a request that Minogue be killed by a plane), the reviewer also attacked her art. ‘[Minogue] told a press conference that a major concert was out of the

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Kylie Minogue’s Kylie

question … presumably until she learns to sing’ (Dennis 1988b: 32). Finally, the author did concede that Minogue had actually been successful, despite his misgivings, ending by saying ‘to be fair, her success is both confounding and amazing’ (1988b: 32). There was a clear rejection of Kylie by members of the music industry, even if this rejection did not seem to reflect audience and fan opinions. As Kim Langley wrote in a feature for the industry insert Metro, ‘[e]ven though it tops the charts, they [key radio stations in Melbourne and Sydney] staunchly refuse to play I Should Be So Lucky’ (1988: 1). That’s not to say that these outlets wanted to ignore Minogue altogether and simply fill their airwaves with music they felt was more worthy. As Langley continued, many would instead play ‘send-ups like I could be a Yuppie and I’m a Lucky Ducky’, with ‘[o]ne Sydney disc jockey remind[ing] listeners they were on “Minogue-free radio”’ (1988: 1). The problem was, apparently, that there was no way to be ‘Minogue neutral’ – it was important to be seen to be either actively for or against her. Throughout this book we will explore why Minogue personally and the Kylie album specifically drew such extreme reactions. There are academic theories about this: the energies that are invested into fandom and its opposite, antifandom (Giuffre 2014). To be seen as a Kylie Minogue fan had a specific cultural meaning at this time – as did being seen to not be a Kylie Minogue fan.

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Surely, the haters have gotten over themselves since 1988? It would be nice to assume that since the 1980s women in music have been given more respect. In many ways this is true, but

not always of Kylie Minogue. Some retrospectives about Kylie have been equally, if not more, savage than the original 1980s reviews. A common feature of these reviews is the suggestion that Minogue’s success and legacy depend on the influence of key men in the Australian industry. One story in particular seems to have gained traction: the idea that Minogue’s success was somehow linked to her involvement with INXS singer Michael Hutchence. This type of narrative tends to overinflate Hutchence’s influence, and often refuses to let the facts get in the way of a good story. Minogue’s romantic relationship with Hutchence in the early 1990s has been referred to by many as an artistic turning point for Minogue, away from her early album, or ‘from pop tart to pop smart’ as former Smash Hits Australia writers put it (Andrews, Isaac and Nichols 2011: 127). Even when being inducted into the ARIA Hall of Fame in 2011, Minogue’s proximity to Hutchence is what led narratives about her. A preview of the award for the Sydney Morning Herald began: WHEN Kylie Minogue takes the stage at Homebush to be inducted into the ARIA Hall of Fame on Sunday night before thousands of music industry contemporaries whose approval she once craved, there will be one key player in her well-told story missing from the crowd: the late Michael Hutchence. (Hornery 2011: online)

Speaking of her former lover and frontman of INXS, she agreed that he was, in part, responsible for much of her later

­Introductio

From here the review degenerated further to move away from Minogue’s musical achievements and instead towards Hutchence’s abilities in the bedroom. Paraphrasing Minogue rather than quoting her directly, journalist Hornery said:

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success, having long been credited as the man who gave her the confidence to transform from ‘singing budgie’ to sensual siren … While they were dating, Hutchence was famously quoted saying his favourite hobby was ‘corrupting Kylie’. Yesterday, his hobbyhorse looked back at that time with great fondness.

Kylie Minogue’s Kylie

(Hornery 2011: online)

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Apart from the continued objectification of Minogue as a mere ‘hobbyhorse’, it’s curious that this article, which is meant to be about her achievements, continues to focus so much on Hutchence. Another example of this tendency to attribute agency to Hutchence rather than to Minogue can be seen in the animated series Australian Encounters, funded by Screen Australia and Film Victoria and released in 2013. Clearly meant to be a satirical approach to Australian icons, the series featured an episode called ‘Kylie Minogue & Michael Hutchence (1987)’. The description of the episode is (ironically) cartoonish, suggesting that Minogue’s success was the result of the relationship: ‘Kylie Minogue met Michael Hutchence at a bash after the Countdown Awards in July 1987. By the time their two-year affair ended, it had transformed a singing budgie into a femme fatale, and set Kylie’s course towards pop divadom’ (Imberger et al. 2013). It is not until we are two-thirds of the way through the episode that it makes its first proper reference to Minogue’s own music, delivered with a patronizing tone and only thinly veiled misogyny: ‘Kylie quit Neighbours to pump out million-selling chart busters, vapid “off the shelf” dance tracks made bearable only by her cute exuberance’ (2m06s-2m17s). Perhaps unsurprisingly, this series, and the magazine column it was based on, was developed by an all-male team. The series was meant to be comedic, but this depiction of Minogue begs

­Introductio

the question: at whose expense is the joke being made, and why is she so often a target? Interestingly, this period of her career was recalled rather differently when a female journalist was involved. In a 2014 interview with Tracey Grimshaw for the Australian version of A Current Affair, Grimshaw raised early criticism of Minogue’s career, as well as her time with Hutchence: ‘[Y]ou didn’t need help to get into the business, you got great opportunities at the start of your career, but you certainly had to struggle with criticism. How much did that affect you at the time?’ (Grimshaw on ACA 2014: 1.11–1.20). Minogue’s reply was: ‘[Y]eah, it was unpleasant’ (Minogue on ACA 2014: 1.22–1.30). Following some memories from Minogue about Hutchence, Grimshaw says ‘[Hutchence] said at the time that his hobby was “corrupting Kylie”, but I always had this notion that rather than “corrupting” you he was empowering you’ (Grimshaw on ACA 2014: 2.50–3.00). Minogue graciously replies: ‘I think “corrupting Kylie” just sounds good, and we know his personality, you can hear him saying that.’ At this point in the interview Minogue’s words are used as a narration for still black-and-white images of Hutchence in various poses, including with other women, as she concludes: ‘[I]t just broadened my horizons, and because he was many things in one man, my experience was many things’ (Minogue on ACA 2014: 3.09–3.19). Even decades later, Minogue is apparently not allowed to come out and be multidimensional in her own right. She remains a figure defined in relation to the men in her life. Later in her life Nick Cave was also credited with giving Minogue musical and cultural ‘credibility’ within the Australian and international industries. For example, when working together in the mid-1990s, Nick Cave invited Minogue to recite the lyrics of ‘I Should Be So Lucky’ onstage at the Royal Albert

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Hall in London as a way of exorcizing the demons of that time (Smith 2015: online). Interestingly, it was actually Minogue who changed opinions about Cave, finally giving him his first Number One single for their duet ‘Where the Wild Roses Grow’ (Creswell and Fabinyi 1999: 196). There was always a sting in the tail though, with the story continuing: ‘While Cave may have respected Minogue as a singer, producer Tony Cohen claims to have a self-portrait of the Bad Seed masturbating over a picture of Kylie’ (Creswell and Fabinyi 1999: 196). Because, of course, being respected as a musician needed to be qualified – it couldn’t just be the end of the story.

Kylie Minogue’s Kylie

Giving Kylie some proper kudos

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The musicologist Robert Walser points out that when critics call music ‘bad’, the judgment applies as much to other listeners as it does to the sounds themselves. If the music is ‘bad’, then ‘people who like such bad music are stupid’ (Walser 2007: 511). That idea applies very much in the case of Kylie: criticisms of the album were often veiled criticisms of the two groups who most visibly embraced it: young girls and gay men. Neither group was given much respect by a straight-white-male-dominated press and recording industry. Instead, these listeners, and by extension the music that appealed to them, were considered infantile, incomplete and insincere. Some commentators could see the problem early on. As Graeme Turner wrote in Meanjin in 1991: [T]he trouble is, as I must admit to thinking in relation to Kylie Minogue, that anyone who is so widely seen as so selfevidently bad, and yet who serves a devoted, demographically

specific and culturally denigrated audience, must deserve more serious consideration than she customarily receives. (Turner 1991: 25)

­Introductio

What Turner doesn’t explore, but which we’re interested in here, is that phrase ‘so self-evidently bad’. We challenge that idea, and ask: what is the scale for ‘bad’ (and presumably its opposite, ‘good’) that is being used to measure here? In terms of sales, the album was a huge success. It won multiple international awards and established a career for Minogue that is now decades old and still going strong. And there is plenty to talk about in terms of the actual sound of Kylie  – the songs, the performance, the production. But for each of these external ‘triumphs’, it seems that an internal battle was lost. Did these accolades really ‘count’ when applied to music that appealed to such an unappealing group of listeners? We consider how Kylie combines several musical traditions and small-screen celebrity. We explore the power relationships between different types of critics, fans and subcultures. We also explore the paradox that Kylie – an extremely mainstream product – had an immense appeal to subaltern groups frequently excluded from the rock critical establishment, including teenage girls and gay men. The book will explore the tension between Minogue’s role as singer and soap star. We consider if there is a way of dealing with ‘mainstream’ pop without denigrating the music (Steinbrecher 2021: 409) and – just as importantly – without validating it according to the terms of a ‘high art’ canon. In this sense, the book might be thought of as a response to a common dichotomy that Andrew Goodwin identified back in the 1990s: the ‘assumption that one cannot enjoy popular culture and understand its appeal while also seeing at work its mechanisms of manipulation and

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its relationship to political power, as well as its more liberatory aspects’ (Goodwin 1992: xxiii). Another objective of the book is to shed light on the way that notions of ‘mainstream’ and ‘other’ play out in a local context – specifically, Australia and Aotearoa/New Zealand music. The book is split into chapters that cover key themes as a simple (and very on-brand daggy 1980s) acrostic. To follow is: ‘K – Kinda Girlie, Kinda Gay’ This is the chapter where we consider identity politics relating to Kylie Minogue and the fans the record attracted. ‘Y – Young’ Here, we consider how Minogue personally, and by extension her fans, was positioned in terms of the broader Australian cultural landscape.

Kylie Minogue’s Kylie

‘L – Long Player’ This is the chapter where we consider the specifics of the record – breaking it down into specific sounds, lyrics, patterns and production specs.

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‘I – Industry’ Here, we explore how Kylie was placed in the local Australian industry with Mushroom Records, and in the international industries with SAW. ‘E – Endurance’ In this chapter, we take a deep dive into the ­reasons why Kylie became and continues to be such a recognizable part of culture, especially gay male culture.

Across these chapters, three main themes emerge. 1. Cultural and contextual consideration of the impact of Kylie – considering the (popular) music traditions that brought this album into being. 2. The importance of television’s influence in building the star, and the reactions for and against the album and its contributors. 3. Detailed consideration of the value of certain (rock) audiences and the ‘disposability’ of others (teenage girls and gay men). Although Kylie is not part of the typical white, straight, male, US/UK ‘popular music canon’, it represents a clear mainstream and commercial breakthrough at the time of release and since.

What this book is about – Kylie and the fans

­Introductio

For us, talking about Kylie really means talking about the fans. Kylie matters because of the people who were and are fans. Kylie resonated with two specific groups when it was first released  – young fans (particularly young girls) and gay men. These groups are significant because they were often referenced as part of the reviews of the album, and their devotion was not viewed as an asset by those ‘in the know’. Reviews of Kylie in the leadup to its release and in the months after were scathing. These didn’t seem to be appraisals of her music, but more of the machine she was seen to be part of. We dedicate this book to all the lovers, especially those who love the wrong music.

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Kylie Minogue’s Kylie

Final disclaimer before we go further

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Kylie, the album, is dated. It was dated even by the time of her third album, Rhythm of Love (1990). As we explain later, there are cowbells here that can be traced back to Divine’s ‘You Think You’re a Man’ (1984) and Dead or Alive’s ‘You Spin Me Round’ (1984), and the album lacks many of the allusions to more ‘fashionable’ genres (such as Chicago house) that were emerging at the time. Given that Kylie is so closely associated with the 1980s, we attempt to recreate a sense of how the music sounded and was received in the late 1980s. The specifics of Australia at this time is our focus, but by no means our limit. Kylie was shunned by ‘serious’ critics, seen as too commercial, too formulaic, too popular with the wrong people. The album and its collaborators were openly mocked by the industry and beyond, even as they won industry awards and acclaim. Over three decades later, Minogue remains an active and prominent figure in international popular music. So too did her audience who persisted and grew – literally growing older and more accomplished in their own lives (read: more respected) but also with time seeing a change in the way their ‘type’ – young girls, young queer people, young people in general – have been treated by the establishment. While there has by no means been a perfect redressing of balance, it is heartening that artists like Billie Eilish – right smack in the middle of mainstream pop at a young age – are not regularly subjected to the kind of public mud-flinging that young Minogue was. Similarly, it’s heartening to see musicians who started on television such as Harry Styles refuse to be drawn into press-baited value judgements relating to gender,

sexuality and age. Famously, he scolded Rolling Stone for their sneering attitude towards young girls, arguing: ‘How can you say young girls don’t get it? … They’re our future. Our future doctors, lawyers, mothers, presidents, they kind of keep the world going’ (Styles in Tom 2017: online). The generally positive responses to Lil Nas X’s coming out are also promising indicators of progressive change, as is the endurance of Minogue herself and the increasingly visible queer fanbase, a point we explore in more detail in ‘Endurance’. In short, then, this book explores several aspects of Kylie. As we will show, the album was important for Mushroom Records in Australia because it signalled a pivot away from the rock music which had dominated the label up to the late 1980s, and because it radically changed the fortunes of the UK label PWL Records. In addition, the album – although a huge seller and therefore undeniably a part of ‘mainstream’ popular music  – also resonated with audiences that major industry figures did not take seriously, such as young girls and gay men. We want to tease out some of the ways in which the album appealed to these audiences – becoming, in effect, a kind of not-entirelymainstream product even from within the ‘mainstream’. We also acknowledge that hopefully much has changed in the Australian music industries since Kylie’s first release too – as Stratton and Dale put it, there is, importantly, ‘an increasing visibility and presence of women in the Australian music industry’ (2020: 7).

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­ – Kinda Girlie, K Kinda Gay When Kylie was released, Minogue didn’t fit into the Australian music scene. She wasn’t ‘Oz Rock’ enough to be AC/DC; she wasn’t international pop-chic enough to be Olivia NewtonJohn; she wasn’t bold enough to be Helen Reddy; she wasn’t nationalistic enough to be Men At Work; she wasn’t adultcontemporary enough to be Peter Allen. Her brand of pop didn’t ‘fit’ into the local imagining of what Australian music was, so Kylie found an audience that had not really been assembled together before in Australia by a local artist. Minogue’s fans didn’t fit in terms of age, gender and identity: they were too old for nursery rhymes but not old enough to get into music venues; they were not able to feel safe at rock pubs where homophobia and misogyny were certainly tolerated, if not encouraged. Much of Australia’s popular music culture from the 1950s onwards was ‘founded, and perpetuated upon, a specific set of performers as the repositories of power and wider meaning: white, male and (sub)urban’ (Homan 2000: 44). The consequences of this power structure meant that anyone who didn’t fit this bill was excluded, sometimes violently. Homan explained this in terms of key moments like the ‘Sydney town hall [sic] scene of 1957, where women realized their limited place within formative subcultures’, as well as the ‘death-todisco agendas of the late 1970s’ and of course ‘the international successes of explicitly masculine acts such as Midnight Oil and

AC/DC throughout the 1980s’ (2000: 44). This was confirmed by the culture of radio during this time, too. As former editors of Smash Hits Australia put it: Pop still wasn’t being played on Australian radio … Target demographics, focus groups, rock-loving program directors and a virulent homophobic culture in radio – let’s just call it the Diesel effect – meant pop was near-enough banned from the airwaves. While a handful of TV music video programs, mostly early morning shows for kids, helped bridge the gap, the main playground for pop was magazines.

Kylie Minogue’s Kylie

(Andrews, Isaac and Nichols 2011: 95)

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The ‘Diesel effect’, a reference to the band Johnny Diesel and the Injectors (which later morphed into the solo artist Diesel, and later still Mark Lizotte), encapsulates the narrowness of the market that Kylie was released in. Although Johnny Diesel and the Injectors’ debut self-titled album was released a little after Kylie, its lead single ‘Don’t Need Love’, released in October 1988, was a far cry from Minogue’s ‘I Should Be So Lucky’. While Minogue’s lyrics and images were about unrequited and imaginary relationships (including no direct references to sex, as we’ll demonstrate in the chapter ‘Long Player’), ‘Don’t Need Love’ talked directly about ‘self abuse’ and dominance. Minogue was considered safe, family-oriented entertain­ ment in terms of presentation and the music she made. Her music was aimed squarely at the mainstream, wanting to be as inclusive as possible to any demographic which was interested. ‘Mainstream’, of course, is often used as a pejorative term, so we should stress that we are using it in the more neutral sense suggested by Steinbrecher (2021): ‘mainstream popular music is very popular popular music, striving for maximum popularity with the largest part of the listening audience and to succeed

in top positions of the charts’ (2021: 407). This relatively generic approach was actually what annoyed critics; being middleof-the-road is what made her music, in their opinion, bland and uninteresting. If Minogue was to rise and thrive in the mainstream, she needed to be able to appeal to as broad a base as possible. That meant making music that was appealing, without creating attention that might repel. In relation to Top Forty music, Huber described music on the radio as music that listeners would not actively ‘dislike’ (Huber 2008: 276). We’ll explore the specifics of the music itself and the context of its production in coming chapters (‘Long Player’ and ‘Industry’). For now we want to consider the identities that were represented and expressed through Kylie – what we refer to as ‘kinda girlie’ and ‘kinda gay’. This position of being ‘kinda’ – that is, not too far one way or another – is also an important thing to remember when considering the commercial success of Kylie. Being nonextreme meant being non-threatening in many ways, but it also drew the ire of critics. Wark explained that there was an ‘irony’ to this middle ground: when nothing stood out, there appeared to be nothing left but a ‘banality’ that ‘appears to some people as far from innocuous, but as somehow deeply threatening’ (1999: 84). Below we explain that this was not banality as in a lack of substance, but rather a move from the centred preferences of sexualized womanhood and the heterosexual gaze; in 1980s Australia this was very threatening indeed.

Although Minogue was legally an adult when Kylie was ­ released, she was frequently presented as childlike. Her character Charlene in Neighbours was apparently seventeen

K – Kinda Girlie, Kinda Gay

Kinda Girlie

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at the time of her onscreen wedding (Minogue in Dillon 1987: 4), which aired at the same time that nineteen-year-old Minogue’s ‘Locomotion’ was released. Charlene often attracted the description ‘tomboy’ because of her personality and her job as a mechanic (Dobbie 1989: 38; Avieson 1988: 6; Oram 1988: 68), placing her at odds with other ‘girl’ archetypes in pop music (such as the persona in Cyndi Lauper’s 1983 anthem ‘Girls Just Wanna Have Fun’). At the age of nineteen, Minogue was probably too old for Australian ‘teen’ music as it had been developed in the 1960s with artists such as Little Pattie (Pattie Amphlett was fourteen when she entered the public spotlight). Age aside (which we’ll explore in the chapter ‘Youth’) it was important that Minogue was a certain type of woman – she was only ‘kinda girlie’ rather than overly sexualized. As Creswell and Fabinyi put it, there was a clear distinction made between her ‘real’ and ‘perceived’ identities: ‘Kylie was marketed as a sweet virgin, despite the fact she was living in sin with the habitual pot smoker Jason Donovan’ (1999: 167). Being only ‘kinda girlie’ was part of the approach that Minogue’s international producers, Stock, Atiken and Waterman took, too. When reflecting on their success generally, Stock offered Minogue’s early musical persona and the negotiations around that as an ideal, offering the following advice to up and coming artists: Don’t try to be sexy. Kylie Minogue always wanted to be a sex Kylie Minogue’s Kylie

siren, when everyone wanted her to be the girl next door.

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That’s not to denigrate her, but so often girl singers feel the need to adopt a raunchy image instead of being nice and normal. There is actually quite a lot of sex appeal in being demure. The Madonna approach doesn’t appeal to all. (Stock 2004: 168)

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For Stock here, and mainstream success generally, the key is not to rock the boat. The worst thing would be to have an approach that ‘doesn’t appeal to all’. This is of course impossible – there is no way to please everyone all of the time. And when Minogue got it wrong – or at least, didn’t please in the right way – as we know, she copped a lot from critics. Women and girls in the Australian music industry were in the minority. They had minority status in two ways. The first was purely numerical: take a look at the sleeves of 1980s Australian pop compilation albums (1982 … In the Sun; Thru the Roof ’83; 1984 The Beat; 1987 Let’s Party; and so on), and note the sheer preponderance of blokes. The other way in which women were a ‘minority’ was in the sense of their tobe-looked-at-ness (Gaar 2002; Davies 2001). There were of course non-male artists who had made it in Australia, but they were almost always subject to the male gaze. The most famous one was Olivia Newton-John. Her 1983 single ‘Physical’ was accompanied by a video in which she was dressed in tight lycra and sang thinly veiled double entendres about working out and sex. Minogue was clearly aligned with a different type of female identity; she was given what was widely described as a ‘girl-next-door’ image where she was considered ‘everyone’s favourite sister or daughter or niece’ (Oram 1988: 65). Writing in the context of Neighbours and Minogue’s persona in the soap, Oram said: ‘[s]ex appeal had nothing to do with it’ (Oram 1988: 65), a position that was represented sonically and lyrically on Kylie too, as will be explained in ‘Long Player’. Importantly, Minogue was presented as relatively ‘clean-cut’ in the context of international popular music. This too was part of the SAW agenda. As Wark put it, ‘Kylie’s London makeover fashioned her into SAW’s “millionaire next door” look. They produced happy sounding records with young, clean, well-groomed and

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styled singers who appeared to be enjoying themselves and unlike the typical Rock God, did not whine in interviews about tedious drug problems’ (1999: 84). Writing in 1992 in one of the first academic analyses of Minogue and her influence, Rex explored Minogue in terms of the ‘new pop woman’ of the time, a category Rex explains was ‘waiting to be recognised by pop criticism’ (1992: 149). After setting up the context, Rex stated: In a circularity of negative connotation, the derision for Minogue extended both to and from her audience, whose estimated ages ranged from eight to eighteen. The judgements of pre-teens and teens (and it was generally assumed that her audience was predominantly female) carry little credibility in male-dominated circles.

Kylie Minogue’s Kylie

(1992: 150)

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This commentary is important because it directly ties Minogue to her fans, and by extension, the disapproval of her and them by ‘male-dominated circles’. The repeated emphasis on the age of her fans serves further to devalue them, as will be explored in the next chapter, ‘Young’. One of Rex’s key points was that there was no easy or acceptable way for fans of Minogue to display their fandom, saying ‘generally they enjoyed their fandom in private’ (Rex 1992: 151). It’s easy to understand why, as even decades later in commentaries such as Cockington’s Long Way to the Top: Stories of Australian Rock & Roll (2001) Minogue’s Neighbours character Charlene and her fans were called ‘dead ordinary’ to the point of being ‘unattractive … permanently grumpy, short-fused, suspicious’ and ‘shrew[s] in training’ (241). An important part of Rex’s analysis was Minogue’s failure to neatly and overtly fit into a gender role. This is not to say that she was androgynous, but rather than she wasn’t girly

K – Kinda Girlie, Kinda Gay

enough. Rex continued: ‘[t]he subtext … was along the lines of “Who does this talentless little blond bimbo with the bland voice think she is?”’ (1992: 150), with ‘bland’ a euphemism for an insufficiently gendered performance. While ‘girlie’ singers of the time had a type, like Lauper’s ‘baby-like’ delivery or Madonna’s ‘raunchiness’, Minogue’s voice was actually quite generic. It didn’t have the soaring range of Donna Summer or the quality and depth of tone that Olivia Newton-John had. Most critically, Minogue was only ‘kinda girlie’ because she didn’t yet appeal to the male gaze in the same way that ‘grown women’ singers did. It is telling that when paparazzi images emerged of Minogue topless in Bali, the photos were reported in terms of her small cup size. A writer for the Sydney Morning Herald said: ‘The mystifyingly-successful soap opera has had television critics globally reaching for thesauruses to find a better word than “vile” to describe [seeing Minogue and Donovan topless] … One noted, with doubtless relish: “She looked thin and her breasts were quite small”’ (Dennis 1988b: 24). Minogue’s genuine love of pop as a genre was clearly visible as an artist and as an interviewee, and it was through that fandom that she connected with fans and the few local press outlets who supported her. Former writers for Smash Hits Australia recalled meeting her for an interview while ‘the rest of the industry were busy sneering, wishing Kylie would disappear back to TV land’ (Andrews, Isaac and Nichols 2011: 98). In that interview, Minogue and the authors ‘spent a couple of hours listening to records’ while Minogue ‘danced wildly around the room to the songs that she liked’ (Andrews, Isaac and Nichols 2011: 99). Unlike the other commentators of the day who conflated a love of pop music with some kind of deficiency (or at least, with the sin of being ‘uncool’), Minogue cheerfully embraced the genre. Her enthusiasm made her

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relatable to an audience of female fans – who in practice, as well as in theory – had continued to be sidelined. As Garratt explained: On the whole, the word ‘fans,’ when applied to women, is derogatory. It is always assumed that they are attracted to a person for the ‘wrong’ reasons, that they are uncritical and stupid. As an audience, they are usually treated with contempt by both bands and record companies. The ‘real’ audience is assumed to be male, and advertisements, record sleeves, and even stage presentation are nearly always aimed at men.

Kylie Minogue’s Kylie

(Garratt 1990: 409)

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Minogue’s own fandom also caught the attention of Australian music industry super producer, promoter and talent scout Ian ‘Molly’ Meldrum. In many ways it was pop music fandom that tied Minogue and Meldrum together. Their paths first crossed when Minogue was in the audience of Meldrum’s hugely successful music show, Countdown. As the story goes, Minogue was only twelve years old when she went to see the show live, going ‘to see The Swingers perform Counting the Beat’, and then being subsequently ‘gutted’ when she didn’t catch the drumstick they threw into the crowd’ (Jenkins 2007: 222). Minogue finally made it onstage as a guest on Countdown on 5 October 1986. She appeared alongside Guy Pearce and Jason Donovan as part of a Neighbours cross-promotion, and it was this appearance, where Meldrum urged Donovan and Minogue to record a demo, that eventually led to her signing with Mushroom. Molly Meldrum was easily the most visibly powerful man in the Australian music industry during this time, with his ability to promote new artists, as well as to connect them to other industry members, unparalleled. As part of

K – Kinda Girlie, Kinda Gay

this job he also regularly made energetic displays of his pop music fandom – and like Minogue this also saw him relatively ostracized by those who considered it better to remain aloof or ‘cool’. Meldrum, like Minogue, remained unconcerned about what other industry members thought because it was this enthusiasm that endeared him, and her, to the public. Meldrum was also an outsider in the 1980s Australian music industry because he was not entirely straight. Meldrum’s nickname, ‘Molly’, was reportedly given to him by one of his early colleagues, Stan Rolfe, at the magazine Go-Set – as retaliation for an ongoing rivalry the two men had been having in their respective columns for the magazine. As Meldrum recalls in his autobiography, there was a suggestion to ‘give [me] a girl’s name, something that goes with Meldrum’, and that the original suggestion was ‘Mildred’ although ‘for some reason, Ian [Buckland, who also worked in the Go-Set office] typed “Molly” instead’ (Meldrum 2017: 16). While the statement ‘for some reason’ is not unpacked in Meldrum’s account, it’s worth acknowledging that ‘Molly’ is an early colonial slang term for ‘homosexual’ (Smyth 2009: 212; see also McIntosh 1981: 37). Although never completely ‘out’ in terms of his sexuality, Meldrum’s queer identity was referenced more and more openly throughout the 1980s and into the 1990s and 2000s. Associations with pop music generally, and Minogue specifically, were used gently as euphemistic ways to reference Meldrum’s position as a non-straight man; however, at times these references were less subtle, with a statement by Minogue used as the opening quote to Meldrum’s 2017 autobiography ‘Long may he [Meldrum] reign as our King, or Queen, of Pop ‘n’ Roll’ (Minogue in Meldrum 2017: v). Importantly, as will be shown throughout this book, this position of being only ‘kinda gay’ (or alternatively, not overtly heterosexual) was an

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important one in 1980s Australia. As Young observed, despite an apparent expectation that the arts were ‘a “safe haven” for male homosexuals’, in reality things were to remain unsaid; ‘for the most part the sexuality of male performers in Australian music and dance is rarely ever revealed explicitly as anything other than heterosexual’ (Young 2004: 176). This position has changed in the decades following, with a diversity of identities now part of 2020s Australian popular music and culture, including LGBTQIA+, non-binary and gender diverse artists such as Courtney Barnett, GFlip, Paul Mac, Montaigne and Mo’Ju, and Troye Sivan.

Kylie Minogue’s Kylie

Kinda Gay

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Australian mainstream music in the 1980s was overwhelmingly dominated by the opinions of straight, white men. Their music and their perspectives were considered the most valuable, with anything counter to this seen as subordinate in one way or another. The most revered music made by Australian artists at this time was Oz Rock, a form dominated by the likes of Skyhooks, Cold Chisel and AC/DC – artists who were clearly, if not at times aggressively, heterosexual. Associated with rowdy pub performances, Oz Rock artists and their audiences were seen as the polar opposite to dance music, which often incorporated more female and queer perspectives. Kylie was not a disco record, but it was much closer to dance than pub rock (and the links to dance, especially hiNRG, will be discussed in the ‘Long Player’ chapter). Still, Kylie was swept up in an industry-led culture war that had been going on for at least a decade. A now infamous letter to Australian rock magazine, RAM, from December 1978, drew

There was no way Mums and Grannies would have liked SAW artist Divine. When we recorded him that wasn’t for a pop crossover record, it was strictly aimed at the gay community. Divine was outrageous, a pantomime figure, but wacky enough to be successful. (Stock 2004: 173)

K – Kinda Girlie, Kinda Gay

the territory lines. Reproduced in Riley (1992) and again in Hawkins (2004), the letter was infamous for the way it pitted the industry and its fans against each other; ‘good recording artists … like Midnight Oil, David Warner, the Angels, Cold Chisel etc’ against ‘this fuckin’ disco shit which is fit for sheilas and pooftas’ (Cumhead 1978: 2). The author of this letter was listed as ‘Eddie Cumhead’  – presumably a pseudonym – although interestingly the RAM letters editor (Annie Dutton) replied also using the categories, saying ‘what’s wrong with poofs and sheilas, anyway’? Pooftas and sheilas made up the audience for Kylie. There were many reasons for this that we’ll explore later in this book. In the context of 1980s Australia, where homosexuality was still illegal in some states and only relatively recently decriminalized in others, discos were also relatively safe places for women who did not want to be harassed by straight men. As Michelle Arrow puts it, disco ‘created an alternative space for women and gay men outside the aggressively masculine space provided in pubs’ (2009: 131–2). The association of dance/pop cultures with women continued to persist well into the 2000s, with the expectation that the dominant form, Oz Rock, was still a heterosexual male domain (Rhodes and Pullen 2012: 37). Prior to Kylie, SAW had made dance records that were clearly more targeted at gay male audiences. Writing about their production of Divine, Stock recalled:

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Minogue was the opposite of Divine in just about every way. The key difference was that Divine was a drag queen and Minogue was not. In addition, Minogue was physically small and relatively sedate while Divine was large in both body and presence; Minogue was considered ordinary while Divine was ‘wacky’; Minogue was conservative while Divine was a pantomime. The most challenging thing about Minogue was really her non-conformist character Charlene, in Neighbours, who was a mechanic and ‘a bit of a rebel’ (Oram 1988: 68). Had any of this ‘alternative’ presentation of womanhood attracted queer attention at all, it was only ‘kinda gay’, especially given how quickly Minogue’s character was tamed by marriage in the infamous ‘Scott and Charlene’ wedding. As women’s magazine New Idea proclaimed alongside an image of the television wedding, ‘Charlene Mitchell has won thousands of hearts – especially now that Charlene is to walk down the aisle to wed her boyfriend Scott Robinson’ (Dillion 1987: 4). This was one of many similar media reports at the time.

Kylie Minogue’s Kylie

Friends of Charlene?

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I­f queer audiences were looking for a hero in Minogue in the 1980s and in Kylie as a soundtrack, they were only going to be partially rewarded. There were reports that Kylie Minogue was aware of a queer male following for her music, and that she supported it from afar: ‘[Minogue] cleverly cultivated a gay audience after being told that drag artistes were imitating her (allegedy she went to see them in Sydney in disguise’ (Cockington 2000: 242). Interestingly, her male counterpart, Jason Donovan, was very clear about his position in relation to an association with anything other than heterosexuality: in

K – Kinda Girlie, Kinda Gay

1992 he ‘sued The Face [magazine] for insinuating he was a homosexual’ (Cockington 2000: 242). In this way then, Kylie was only ‘kinda gay’ – there was no local ‘Friends of Charlene’ movement to mirror the ‘Friends of Dorothy’ in the United States. (There, the term ‘Friends of Dorothy’ had become shorthand for ‘gay man’ – a knowing reference to the character ‘Dorothy’ in the film The Wizard of Oz, played by future gay icon Judy Garland.) Interestingly in the decades to come an association with Minogue would become shorthand for queer identity, as demonstrated famously in Ireland in 2019 with the ‘KylieGate’ scandal. Here, the Irish media attacked thenPrime Minister Leo Varadkar (who had been out since 2015) in vaguely homophobic terms for writing a fan letter to Minogue (Kerrigan and Pramaggiore 2021: 114–15). Richard Dyer’s classic 1979 essay defending disco from a gay perspective tellingly begins with the line: ‘[A]ll my life I’ve liked the wrong music’ (1990: 410). Put differently, the music appropriated by gay men, the music which eventually becomes part of ‘gay culture’, is often mass-produced, mainstream and widely devalued. Given the hostile reception that Kylie received in the pop and rock press, Minogue was already ripe for gay appropriation. As Corey Creekmur and Alexander Doty note, queers have often had a fraught relationship with mass culture (1995: 3). On the one hand, mass culture has frequently been explicitly framed as heterosexual or heterosexist. To take just one example, consider the lyrics of ‘Got to Be Certain’, which presume that both the song’s protagonist and her potential lover are heterosexual. This type of entertainment appears to have nothing to say to queers, and makes no attempt to represent or engage with them. On the other hand, it is clear that queers are a part of that ‘mainstream’, both as creators and as active consumers. Queers may consume mass culture

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in the same way as anyone else, as ‘just’ entertainment. But they also consume mass culture in special, non-standard ways. There are, to borrow Doty’s term, ‘queer moments’ in even the most heterocentrist products of mass culture (Doty 1993: 3). Creekmur and Doty’s reading of The Wizard of Oz perfectly encapsulates this ‘specialness’: The Wizard of Oz is a story in which everyone lives in two very different worlds, and in which most of its characters live two very different lives, while its emotionally confused and oppressed teenage heroine longs for a world in which her inner desires can be expressed freely and fully. Dorothy finds this world in a Technicolor land ‘over the rainbow’ inhabited by a sissy lion, an artificial man who cannot stop crying, and a butch-femme couple of witches. This is a reading of the film that sees the film’s fantastic excesses (color, costume, song, performance, etc.) as expressing the hidden lives of many of its most devoted viewers, who identified themselves as ‘friends of Dorothy’.

Kylie Minogue’s Kylie

(1995: 3)

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­ reekmur and Doty’s reading is useful here because it illustrates C several things. First, even the most apparently ‘innocent’ works of popular culture can be subjected to a kind of double reading, in which particular audiences revel in details that may not be so significant to others. Second, Creekmur and Doty suggest that the text resonates in particular ways with ‘the hidden lives’ of pre-Stonewall gay men. We would suggest that it is easy to perform a similar double-reading of Kylie, and that many people in 1980s Australia knowingly or inadvertently performed this kind of double-reading. Such interpretative moves were a way to be ‘kinda gay’ without necessarily coming out of the closet.

While there are important differences between Judy Garland and Kylie Minogue, Dyer’s essay on Garland does give us some important hints as to why gay male culture engages with mainstream, female stars (whether on screen or on record). However, being simply kinda gay is not enough to explain why Minogue was eagerly adopted by gay male culture almost from the very start of her singing career. None of the above explains why ‘I Should Be So Lucky’ or ‘Got to Be Certain’ or ‘Love at First Sight’ struck a chord (no pun intended) with gay male audiences. Minogue’s appearances at various Mardi Gras celebrations in the 1990s would not have been possible unless there was something in her music or lyrics which had already established her as a drawcard for queer audiences. And the lyrics, on first glance, do not exactly sound like a gay call to arms. Almost all the songs establish some kind of heterosexual love interest, and Minogue sings about romantic love in fairly saccharine terms. There are no powerful diva anthems here (think of Barbra Streisand and Donna Summer’s 1979 track ‘No More Tears (Enough Is Enough)’), nor are there any coded messages, as might be the case in Pet Shop Boys songs such as ‘It Must Be Obvious’ (1990). More on how this connection was made, and so convincingly, in the final chapter of this book, ‘Endurance’.

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­Y – Young Kylie foregrounded young people in several ways. The audience for the album consisted of ‘young girls’, an audience presumably without enough cultural or economic capital to really be worth the music industry’s proper attention. Then there was the age of Minogue herself: not quite nineteen but clearly styled and presented as naive, to the point of being apparently underprepared for music industry success. ‘Young’ was also used as a patronizing catch-all to describe the part of the industry that Minogue and her followers of all ages and stages in life were part of – somehow not yet complete, underdeveloped in their tastes and styles, and even naive. Minogue’s position as ‘young’ was confirmed with the album’s first single, the cover of Carole King and Gerry Goffin’s ‘The Loco-motion’. Before going any further, we should clarify the version we are referring to here. Minogue first recorded the song at the suggestion of Greg Petherick, musical director for the Australian television show Young Talent Time (a program we discuss later in this chapter) (Adams 2017; Adams 2007). This first version used the same title as the Little Eva track (‘The Loco-motion’ (1962)) and was produced by Kaj Dahlstrom at Sing Sing studios, Richmond. Though it has never been officially released, we know that it had a ‘rockier’ feel than the version which eventually appeared on her first album: it featured, among other things, a brass section and live drums. Dahlstrom approached several record labels with this version, all of whom declined to sign Minogue. Even Michael Gudinski at Mushroom Records was initially hesitant, until, during a visit

Kylie Minogue’s Kylie 32

to London, he played the track to his niece and nephew: ‘I told them it was a girl called Kylie. The next day they worked out she was Charlene [from Neighbours]. That’s when I rang the office in Australia and that’s when the decision was made to sign Kylie Minogue’ (Adams 2017). As we shall see later in this book, this is just one of a number of stories about how Minogue got signed to Mushroom Records. Around the same time, Mushroom Records were developing links with PWL Records in the UK. Mushroom executive Gary Ashley had been in talks with Stock, Aitken and Waterman, and in 1987 PWL engineer Mike Duffy took up a three-month residency at Platinum Studios in Melbourne (Adams 2017). Duffy, who had never produced a record before, was tasked with the job of making Minogue’s single sound more like Bananarama. Waterman recalls a phone call from Duffy, in which the latter insisted ‘I don’t know how to do it. You’re the only one who knows how to make your records’, to which Waterman replied: ‘[Y]ou’ve seen me do it enough times. Just copy that’ (Waterman 2000: 172). The version that Duffy produced was simply titled ‘Locomotion’ and was only a hit in Australia, where it reached Number One on the charts. We can hear Duffy’s attempt to sound like SAW: most of the instruments are programmed, some of Minogue’s vocals are stuttered (‘chug-chug-chugchug’), and there is that insistent synthesized electric bass sound that underpins the first verse from 0:08 onwards. But the overall effect is quite different to the SAW sound. The instrumental palette is different (it may be a drum machine but it does not sound like a Linn drum machine), and the texture is nowhere near as ‘busy’ as a typical SAW track – there are no elaborate conga and bongo parts, and limited countermelodies playing in the background. Mushroom arranged for the followup to  be recorded by SAW, who eventually re-produced ‘The

Y – Young

Loco-motion’ (this time reverting to the original title), and their version is the one that reached the Top Ten in the UK, the United States and several other countries. In order to ensure that readers can view the material we discuss below, we refer to the UK version of the video and the accompanying audio track on PWL’s YouTube channel. Note that this version is an edited version of The Kohaku Mix – recognizable because it begins with a male voice calling ‘all aboard!’ rather than the stuttered Minogue vocals of the LP version. Originally recorded by Little Eva (King and Goffin’s real-life babysitter at the time), the lyrics and approach clearly court a  type of musical adolescence, with references to doing the ‘A,B,Cs’ and teaching a ‘little’ ‘baby’ sister the moves. Prior to Minogue’s cover Australian audiences would have known the song from the Little Eva recording in 1962 and another cover by Grand Funk Railroad in 1974, both of which made the charts. In the 1980s prior to Minogue’s cover the song was also included in a series of music books put together by ABC Radio and circulated in primary schools around the country. Called Sing Along (or variations on that theme) the books were collections of printed music that combined nursery rhymes and pop music arranged for easy classroom singalongs. ‘The Loco-Motion’ appeared in the 1983 edition alongside other 1960s pop songs like ‘Yellow Submarine’, ‘Puff the Magic Dragon’, ‘The Lion Sleeps Tonight’ and ‘Downtown’ (ABC Sing 1983: 65) – a further cultural confirmation that the song was somehow music that was particularly appropriate for children. In Minogue’s clip for ‘Locomotion’, being young is clearly displayed. She is shown as playful, and is also framed as clearly unfinished. In the version of the clip as it remains on the PWL YouTube channel, Minogue appears repeatedly in tight midshot before a green-screened graffiti wall, sometimes

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Kylie Minogue’s Kylie 34

wearing an oversized leather jacket to emphasize the apparent edginess of the shot, but, really, to demonstrate that she doesn’t quite yet belong in an adult or ‘dangerous’ environment. This continues as these shots go on to show her directly singing to the camera and inviting the viewer to ‘C’mon’ and do the dance with her, completed with a wink to the camera to invite the viewer to play along. The clip also shows sequences of Minogue being coached with dance steps and styling – showing her as a ‘work in progress’ as well part of the final performance –while later we see her as the pseudo-director taking a group shot of the production cast and crew, which features what appears to be a couple of underage kids. In each case ‘young’ is being displayed  – young dancers, young participants – but also a performer who is not yet ‘fully formed’. The extended version of the official film clip shows Minogue arriving at Essendon airport on a private jet, greeted by television cameras and surrounded by a mixture of young fans and dancers including what are very clearly underage boys and girls. She and the group literally skip through the airport with a mixture of youthful energy, but it appears more juvenile than teenager chic. These ‘behind the scenes’ shots lead finally to Minogue singing in the studio, her huge microphone and headphones dwarfed only by the 1980s blonde bouncy perm on her head. The salient feature we’re meant to focus on here is clearly the hair, not the top-of-the-line headphones and equipment. Does the reference to ‘baby’ in the lyrics mean an actual child here rather than a term of endearment? There are similar markers of being ‘young’ in the other songs and clips for this album. At the time of its release a musical director at a Sydney FM radio station reportedly refused to play ‘I Should Be So Lucky’ because ‘two bars of the song

had the station’s audience complaining about being given “children’s music”’ (Oram 1988: 72). This suggestion was not helped by the famous ‘bubble bath’ scenes in ‘I Should Be So Lucky’, where Minogue blows bubbles towards the camera like a child playing, rather than as a grown woman with bubbles strategically placed to hide her nakedness. There is a similar ‘childishness’ in the lyrics and clip for ‘Got to be Certain’ where in the lyric Minogue asks the listener to ‘wait for’ her repeatedly, suggesting she’s not ready – perhaps too young? Midway through the clip we see her on a carousel with children behind her in the frame, and although she’s dressed in long gloves and a tight dress the setting makes her seem even more ‘unfinished’ – like a kid playing ‘dress up’ in someone else’s clothes. There is also a bloopers segment played during the last repeating chorus, showing Minogue playing but also clearly making mistakes – the montage once again emphasizing that this is someone who hasn’t quite mastered what they’re doing. Throughout, Minogue herself smiles widely, gesturing with mild embarrassment. The song’s lyric asks the listener to ‘wait’ for Minogue, setting up the chorus’s theme of ‘Got to Be Certain’. The repetition of ‘wait’ also reminds though that we are further along than Minogue is; she’s got catching up to do.

Young is not Youth. There’s an important genre and gender difference Y – Young

‘Youth’ and ‘Youth Culture’ are terms that have huge currency in the music business. These are also strongly tied to gender and genre. When used to define and describe performers, ‘youth’

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Kylie Minogue’s Kylie 36

tends to be applied to boys and men who are coming of age and have the world at their feet – the archetypal fresh faces of The Beatles in their prime. As Stuart Hall and Paddy Whannel wrote in 1964, with pronouns clearly fixed, the pop singer ‘is usually a teenager, springing from the familiar adolescent world and sharing a whole set of common feelings with his audience’ (Hall and Whannel in Frith and Goodwin 1990: 29). The other side of ‘youth’ was fans – most often girls and women – who were in the audience for these male artists. Pathologized as being victims of ‘Beatlemania’, the young (mostly) female fans of The Beatles were shown on news bulletins and even in The Beatles’ own film, A Hard Days Night, to be immature and hysterical. Before them, other groups of female fans and male pop stars were similarly grouped in terms of value; notably the young female fans of Frank Sinatra in the 1940s known as ‘bobby soxers’ (Shuker 2016: 12; Savage 2008). Feminist scholars in particular have argued the importance of these pop music fan displays as ways ‘to protest the sexual repressiveness, the rigid double standard of female teen culture’ (Ehrenreich, Heiss and Jacobs 1992: 85). However, music associated with young girls has continued to be considered as ‘less than’ in industry and the academy (Baker 2001), to the point where, as Pini put it, ‘feminists involved in researching youth culture have sought to contest the familiar association of “youth” with masculinity’ (2006: 370, emphasis added). More recently pop music fandom has been theorized beyond traditional heteronormative perspectives. For  example, McCann and Southerland present an examination of ‘fangirls’ for the ‘boy band’ One Direction that considers not just young straight female fans, but also queer receptions of the group and its music via a subset of fans who call themselves ‘Larries’ after the perceived relationship between key members of the group

Harry Styles and Louis Tomlinson (McCann and Southerland 2019). Unlike 1980s Australia when queer identity was seldom celebrated, in these more recent pop music discussions audiences are still ostracized from a dominated straight male discourse, but not with the same blatant homophobia as before. As McCann and Southerland argued in relation to the queer subgroup of One Direction fans, ‘Larries’, ‘the function of the Larries’ challenge to a dominant heterosexual framing … is to create a space of queer survival – a community where queerness finds a home’ (2019: 56–7). ‘Young’, for Minogue as a female pop singer in the 1980s in Australia, was distinct from ‘youthful’ as it had been applied to young (male) rock artists. Audiences were not encouraged to see and hear nineteen-year-old Minogue as someone full of energy and promise, but rather to witness her as not yet artistically complete. These absences were at the heart of the criticism launched at Minogue and the album, and were also part of larger systemic issues relating to gender, genre and fandom. In Australia in 1987, nineteen-year-old Kylie Minogue was a young woman performing in the mainstream popular music industry, and that in itself made her a target. She was not seen as ‘youth’ in the same way that performing men were, partly because of her gender, but also because of her existing profile as a television star. In some ways, she would have been better off having literally had no experience and no media profile rather than having been associated with shows like Neighbours and Young Talent Time.1 To demonstrate the way Minogue was targeted, compare the attitude to Kylie expressed in responses outlined already to Y – Young

Young Talent Time was a television show aimed at families that will be discussed in more detail later in this chapter.

1

37

how some other Australian and Aotearoa/New Zealand artists were received at the same age in the industry. For example, note the following parallel cases: 1. Neil Finn, born in 1958, was nineteen in 1977. That was the year Neil joined Split Enz for the album Dizrythmia, and even though he had not yet been included as songwriter for the band, he was well received as a performer, praised for his ‘enthusiasm’ even if he was yet to master his instrument. He appeared on Countdown on ABC TV with the band to perform ‘My Mistake’ as a bouncing, heavily made up guitarist, and although his early reviews were not exactly glowing, they were not vicious either: ‘contributions from his brother, guitarist Neil Finn, were generally one-dimensional, standard pop performances’ (McGrath 1980: 11).

Kylie Minogue’s Kylie

2. Michael Hutchence, born 1960, was nineteen in 1979. This was the year that his band The Farriss Brothers became INXS, and a year later they released their debut self-titled album which was called a ‘moderate success’ (Adam 1981: 179). Again, while not glowing, it’s hardly a personal attack of the kind Kylie Minogue repeatedly received.

38

3. Nick Cave, born 1957, was nineteen in 1976. As part of the Boys Next Door at this time he was performing covers like ‘These Boots Are Made for Walkin’ by Nancy Sinatra. By 1979, Cave’s original lyrics and delivery were called ‘too often irritably inaudible’, but that the band ‘still had potential’, given that, ‘Let’s face it, an appealing, attractive natural voice can be a band’s greatest asset, especially in this highly emotional area of rock’ (Feliu 1979: 27). 4. Jimmy Barnes, born 1956, was nineteen in 1975. By then he was a couple of years into his role as lead singer for Cold Chisel, and although the band didn’t really achieve any

significant success until 1978 with their self-titled album Cold Chisel, even then his role in the group ‘whose major influence has been the British heavy-metal supergroups’ was called ‘energetic and original’, with Barnes especially providing ‘the band [with] a measure of individuality’ (Janus 1978: 1978).

Y – Young

None of these artists appear to have been subjected to the same level of vitriol as Minogue. Even Minogue’s closest male equivalent, her Neighbours and SAW co-star Jason Donovan, was treated with more respect than she was. Donovan is the same age as Minogue (actually four days younger) and ‘made his name’ via the same soapie and producers she did. Press reviews of Donovan’s profile and music were not nearly as vicious. In the opening chapter of this book we noted how previews of Minogue’s work were described as ‘vanity’, and proclaimed ‘in the best traditions of television self-importance, the Minogue publicity machine says she “oozes personality”; but it doesn’t say whether she can sing’ (Kent 1987: 22). Previews of Donovan’s music in the Sydney Morning Herald, the same publication where Minogue had been so viciously attacked, were far less stinging even though the reviewer had just as much (or just as little) actual music to engage with, saying: ‘One month from now we will be able to savour the fruits of Jason Donovan’s musical stirrings’ (Casimir 1988: 20). Even within sanctioned associated Neighbours product, such as the magazine-style book biography of the soap, Minogue and Donovan were treated differently (Oram 1988). The chapter dedicated to Minogue was called ‘Kylie: “Most Popular Personality”’ (1988: 64–82), while Donovan’s is ‘Jason: “Everyone Wants to Know Him”’ (1988: 83–6). The chapter on Minogue includes several full page photos, many depicting the two actor/musicians together. The implication is that she’s ‘just a pretty face’ and a bit of a fun story, while he is someone with more substance.

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Kylie Minogue’s Kylie 40

Criticisms of Minogue and Kylie tended to be personally directed at her. For example, a review in The Globe said, ‘Kylie looks perky, wears a nice hat on the cover and sings insidious, sub-Abba songs in a voice that reminds you that models should stick to marrying rock stars instead of joining their ranks’ (Dafoe 1988: 3). In contrast, Donovan’s reviews tended to be less personal – or at least not about his person, but about the kind of people who were his fans. Objectified as a ‘heart-throb’ (Condon 1988: 4), the implication was that Donovan was just doing his thing and the real issue was his (young female) fans. As Donovan reportedly said at the time, marking himself as something of a victim of public opinion, ‘I’ve never considered myself a heart-throb … It sounds like a very bad disease. It’s what people label you as. I’d never call myself a sex symbol … What can you do?’ (Donovan in Condon 1988: 4). Also notable was how apparently gullible these fans were, with reports in the Australian press that the UK Sun was ‘offering jars of the [air Donovan had breathed] to determined screamers who write in saying why they are Jase-baby’s greatest fan’ (Wild 1989: 138). Complete with trademark puns, ‘[t]his prize isn’t a lot of hot air, folks, it’s the real thing … Clean-living Jason puffed his stuff for you during a gruelling ten-minute session of AIROBICS’ (Wild 1988: 138). Here the joke is clearly on naive fans for being interested in the promotion rather than Donovan for having actually participated. If indeed it actually was his ‘air’. Another musical artist related to Neighbours during this time was Angry Anderson, who had a huge musical hit with the song ‘Suddenly’. Released commercially around the same time as the Mike Duffy-produced version of ‘Locomotion’, Anderson’s ‘Suddenly’ was the soundtrack for Scott and Charlene’s wedding (Donovan’s and Minogue’s characters) in Neighbours. Anderson was almost forty when ‘Suddenly’ was

released, with a profile as the singer in hard rock band Rose Tattoo and experience as an actor having played the villain ‘Ironbar Bassey’ in Mad Max beyond Thunderdome. While it might be too simple to suggest that members of the press were just too intimidated to harass Anderson in the same way they had Minogue, it does seem strange that Anderson’s release was not given much more venom given how other musicians connected to the show had been treated. At worst he was called ‘now Not-So-Aggressive-But-Still-Relatively-Tough Mr Anderson’ by Wendy Tuohy in The Age (1987: 41), adding the sound ‘could be the doughy result of too much head banging’ (1987: 41). ‘Suddenly’ was connected to Neighbours through a deal with Mushroom records, the same company that locally released Minogue and Donovan’s work. Yet, despite all of these similarities with the circumstances of the Kylie release, Anderson and his music were not met with acid, either.

The problem of music that is associated with ‘young’ television

Y – Young

‘­Young’ was particularly related to one man and his brand in Australia when Kylie was released. That man was Johnny Young, and the show was Young Talent Time, a family-focused variety show. ‘Young’ was – conveniently – both a pun in the title of the program, and happened to be an anglicization of the man’s Dutch name ‘de Jong’. Young Talent Time had been on air since 1971 and was clearly aimed at the pre-adult popular music industry. Comparable with the Mickey Mouse Club in the United States, Young Talent Time covered what might be called the ‘tween’ market today; the audience and some of the

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Kylie Minogue’s Kylie 42

performers seemed barely of primary school age. The music featured was international pop, performed as covers by the young cast to provide a local touchstone for the internationally successful hits. This type of format had a strong history on Australian television, including the local version of Bandstand which featured very early appearances by artists including The Bee Gees, Olivia Newton-John and Peter Allen performing American and British covers. Interestingly, Young had himself been a teenage pop star in the 1960s as part of a television show in Perth called Club Seventeen broadcast on TVW-7 before becoming a ‘serious’ contributor to the music industry as the songwriter of Russell Morris’s psychedelic rock anthem ‘The Real Thing’ (1969). Music that is heavily associated with television can be a particular target for criticism. Of course there are exceptions to this (the upswells of support for MTV, Top of the Pops, Soul Train and revered appearances on various American Tonight shows), but, for the most part, artists who work in both television and music have not been received well. As outlined, Kylie Minogue and her music received much harsher criticism for being linked to television than her male colleagues, an issue related to gender and the genres of television of which she’d been part. When Kylie was released, Minogue had been working consistently for nearly a decade as an actor on Australian soap operas and family dramas. This began with The Sullivans when she was ten years old, followed then at age sixteen by a lead in the The Henderson Kids. She was cast as the infamous Charlene Robinson in Neighbours in 1986 at age seventeen, and had become one of its biggest draw cards in a very short time frame. While this near decade of continuous work in fast-paced and high-pressure productions made Minogue ideally prepared for the intense demands of pop music’s scheduling, her profile

Y – Young

and fan base developed through this work were fodder for critics concerned that her musical success had come at the expense of other more suitable artists. For example, the Sydney Morning Herald called Minogue the ‘country’s fluffiest export since the pavlova’ as the reviewer wrote in disbelief that she had ‘somehow become one of the few Australian artists, other than The Easybeats and Men At Work, to reach number one on the British charts’ (Dennis 1988a: 24). Despite announcing this industry success the review still objectified Minogue as the ‘post-pubescent sex-symbol of Neighbours … with the ditty I Should Be So Lucky’ (Dennis 1988a: 24). Again, the reviewer took a patronizing attitude towards Minogue’s youth, rather than seeing her accomplishments at a young age as markers of ambition or promise. Kylie Minogue appeared on Young Talent Time several times before the release of Kylie. Her sister Dannii was a regular in the YTT cast and arguably the ‘proper singer’ in the family, so Kylie Minogue’s appearances were often as her sister’s sidekick  – famously for a version of ‘Sisters are Doin’ It for Themselves’ in 1986. Johnny Young himself later said that at the time ‘Dannii was the star’, ‘Kylie was trying to make a name as an actress’ (Young in Creswell 2003: 191). In 1987, the Young Talent Time ‘Neighbours special’ aired. Put together as a cross-promotion for Network 10, which produced both Young Talent Time and Neighbours, the broadcast of the episode took place shortly after both the release of ‘Locomotion’ and Minogue’s ‘big moment’ on the soap, the marriage of Scott and Charlene. The episode began with an introduction by Johnny Young, then Minogue, Jason Donovan and Craig McLachlan took over as hosts of the show. Included was a live presentation of ‘Locomotion’, where Minogue performed the single in front of the studio audience intercut with edits from the single’s

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Kylie Minogue’s Kylie 44

film clip for the audience watching at home. After Minogue’s appearance, Jason Donovan led the audience in a singalong of the Neighbours television theme, sung as a duet with a cast of Sesame Street-like puppets that also appeared in the performance. As the audience sang, they were also given hand puppets to wave around. This appearance made clear that Minogue’s fans were not ‘youth’ but ‘young’ – the studio audience clearly predominantly made up of children of primary school age rather than teenagers. Indeed, there are also several toddlers shown sitting on their parents’ laps. Minogue did appear on other music programs at the time, with an appearance on the iconic music show Countdown in 1987 to promote ‘Locomotion’ and The Factory (a youthoriented music and interview show) in 1988. The 1987 appearance was to co-host the show as well as promote her then new-single and video, and while she didn’t perform, her association with a young audience was made clear as Molly Meldrum appeared to interview her with his godchildren  – one young enough to sit on his lap and the other barely old enough to touch the floor as she sat. Meldrum did ask Minogue about the music and held the 12-inch version of the single in his hand as they talked, but in a history of Countdown the appearance still focused on Minogue’s appeal to young audiences, with a still from the interview between Meldrum, Minogue, co-host Mike Hammond and Meldrum’s godchildren captioned ‘Kylie Minogue … hosted the second last episode of Countdown. The young fans would move on to [music video program] Rage’ (Warner 2006: 140). Her interview for The Factory was pre-recorded for the live show as part of what was obviously a press junket for ‘I Should Be So Lucky’. Several times the interviewer Cameron Daddo got details wrong about Minogue’s career to date,

including actually arguing with her at one point about what her first television appearance was. Daddo insisted, repeatedly, she was in a children’s television show called Home (ABC TV 1983), which she gently said ‘no’ to a couple of times before having to say outright ‘I’ve never been in Home’. Even then Daddo insists, ‘Are you sure?!?’, and he gestures to his crew off camera to support him. Despite this, the interview continued and with images of her single for ‘I Should Be So Lucky’ clearly posted behind her Daddo continued to ask Minogue about her acting instead, moving to Neighbours before finally asking her about her music. This exchange only lasted a couple of minutes before he reverted to asking her ‘when you were younger, 15, 16, what did you use to do for fun?’ Rolling her eyes gently, Minogue replied ‘I don’t know, I went to parties I suppose’. Daddo asked next ‘Were you a good girl?’, to which she replied, ‘Yes, everyone’s good when they’re 15 and 16.’ With this the patronizing pattern continued as Minogue was actively infantilized and undermined. The irony is that when Kylie was released, Minogue was much more ‘prepared’ than many of her peers in the media at the time.

­Forever young

Y – Young

The idea of being ‘young’ has continued to follow Minogue even as she (and her fans) has aged. Partly this is because of her physicality as a relatively short and slight woman, but more importantly because of the continued association between pop and a sense of childishness or immaturity. When Minogue was finally inducted into the ARIA Hall of Fame in 2011, it was alongside The Wiggles, artists whose target market is preschoolers. Minogue’s and The Wiggles’ achievements were

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Kylie Minogue’s Kylie 46

Figure 1  Drum Media ARIAs Hall of Fame Cover. Used with permission from SGC Media.

subsequently conflated in the press too, with images such as this cover collage for Sydney-based music press, The Drum Media (see Figure 1). The image, which was used around Australia online as well as in other state-based publications (The Drum Media, Perth; Inpress, Melbourne; Time Off, Brisbane), represented both Minogue and The Wiggles as children’s toys, further reinforcing the idea that they were like toys for ‘young’ people. Interestingly, even here Minogue is presented as a different type of body – the objectified Barbie doll complete with knee high boots – The Wiggles are twice as big in size and literally more floppy in their bodies. Even decades after her first album when Minogue and her core audience are no longer relatively ‘young’, they are still being infantilized and patronized. This is not to say that being included with The Wiggles is in any way derogatory – The Wiggles’ achievements in the Australian and international music industries are in themselves groundbreaking and also worthy of much more respect than is afforded them in this magazine cover. Minogue’s image as a doll here suggests a type of mass manufacturing in her music which we’ll talk about more in ‘Industry’. The continued association with being ‘young’ will also be discussed in ‘Endurance’ and then in the Outro in terms of nostalgia (which, let’s face it, is a big part of why we’re all here in the first place).

Y – Young 47

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­L – Long Player In a way, this is the most difficult chapter to write about Kylie: this is where we talk about the music itself. For us, the challenge is – unlike a book about the Beatles or Radiohead – we can’t assume that people take Kylie’s music seriously, or that they think there is anything of value to hear in these songs. We’re not the first people to face this issue. It’s instructive to read the existing 331/3 books which deal with music that is not part of the pop/rock canon. For instance, Carl Wilson’s book on Celine Dion is not just an analysis of the album Let’s Talk about Love. It is, more broadly, a meditation on ‘why other people have such bad taste’ (2014). In the book, Wilson often grapples with the disjuncture between his own tastes and the ‘bland monotony’ of Dion’s music (2014: 13). In her book on New Kids On the Block’s Hangin’ Tough, Rebecca Wallwork acknowledges that most critics ignore the music itself and focus on New-Kids-as-puppets, their merchandise or the Svengali-like figure who put them together (2016: 13). She confesses to having ‘no clue whether or not [the songs] are very good’ (2016: 11). Elizabeth Vincentelli’s book on ABBA’s Gold begins with the line: ‘If only I’d written about Lou Reed, Bob Dylan or the Beach Boys …. People would have looked at me with a lot more respect’ (2004: 1). All these authors are conscious of the fact that they are not writing about the canon. The very act of writing an entire book about a single album assumes that the album is a ‘work of art’ or at least ‘important’ or ‘significant’ in some way. It is difficult to square such lofty notions with ‘I Should Be So Lucky’.

Kylie Minogue’s Kylie 50

Of course, some scholars have turned their hand to ‘pure pop’, or at least to music that is not widely held in the same regard as the Beatles’ album Abbey Road. Sometimes, this is a deliberate attempt to broaden the musicological repertoire, as in the book Song Interpretation in 21st Century Pop Music (Appen et al. 2015: 2), which includes analysis of tracks by Ke$ha and Destiny’s Child. At other times, authors grapple with noncanonic pop because it happens to coincide with their research brief: for instance, Jay Summach mentions the song ‘Talking In Your Sleep’ (by The Romantics) because it happens to be part of his analytic corpus of 700 songs: ‘the Billboard Annual Top 20s from 1955 to 1989’ (2011). Faced with the task of analysing music which lacks the solemnity of a Johann Sebastian Bach cantata and the ‘authenticity’ of a Bob Dylan song, it can be tempting to ‘canonize by complexity’. We have borrowed the phrase from Chris Kennett (2000: 264). For Kennett, the problem with a lot of pop music analysis is that it implies that the music is a ‘meisterwork’ simply because the analyst can identify particular musical techniques in it: here is an analytical graph derived from music theorist Heinrich Schenker; here are some ‘voiceleading patterns’ (2000: 263–4). Perhaps that works with Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, but Kennett asks: will we really be doing this kind of thing with ‘the latest commercial opus from, say, the UK teen-pop group Steps’ in the year 2030 (2000: 264)? Even Mike Stock, one of the key songwriters behind Kylie, refuses to canonize his own music. In a refreshingly honest appraisal, he says: I don’t hold any elevated opinion of our corpus of songs. I really don’t. If someone said to me, ‘We liked Stock, Aitken

and Waterman because they are in a traditional mould of popular songwriters’, that was about all you can say. I don’t think we broke any moulds or we did anything different. (Egan 2004: 324)

If the music is not the stuff of ‘genius’, then why analyse it? The musicologist Robert Walser provides us with a good starting point. He notes that an analyst’s job is not to engage in music appreciation, in which experts explain to ‘the unwashed masses’ why they should appreciate Beethoven or Leonard Cohen. Rather, our aim is to explain what ‘people [are] hearing and valuing in’ the music (2007: 513). His response to Jason Lee Oakes’s analysis of the group ABBA is particularly instructive for a book about Kylie: Oakes hears as repulsive artifice what many other people have heard as skill, polish, imagination, and utopian plenitude … [But] what about all of us who listen to ABBA with pleasure and don’t care who knows it? Perhaps ABBA … is not the problem at all; perhaps [the problem is] the expectation that we should be ashamed of being moved by such music … Whence comes the suspicion of sentiment, the devaluing of skill, the mistrust of effective invocation of longing and fulfillment? (2007: 512–13)

L – Long Player

We’ll have more to say about the ‘invocation of longing’ later. But in this chapter, we want to do three things. First, we look briefly at the lyrics of Kylie. Next, we examine some musical attributes of the album, including SAW’s musical background. Finally, we use the 12-inch versions of two songs – ‘I Should Be So Lucky’ and ‘Got to Be Certain’ – to draw attention to at least some of what is happening ‘beneath the surface’ of the tracks.

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Kylie Minogue’s Kylie

­Lyrics

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The lyrics on Kylie are almost stubbornly conventional. Some songs explicitly establish a male object of desire by mentioning ‘boys’ (‘Got to Be Certain’; ‘Love at First Sight’). Others do not specify to whom exactly she is singing, but the accompanying music videos helpfully fill in the gaps: in ‘I Should Be So Lucky’, Minogue gazes wistfully at a framed photograph of a male love interest; in ‘Je Ne Sais Pas Pourquoi (I Still Love You)’, she is shown dancing with a man who has presumably just stood her up. The lyrics are also highly conventional insofar as they focus broadly on sentimentality and romance, the kind of subject matter that has long been a staple of Top Forty pop (Frith 2001: 102–3). The songs are overwhelmingly written from a secondperson perspective (see Table  1). As the French sociologist Antoine Hennion has pointed out, this approach is calculated: when songs incessantly refer to ‘you’ and ‘me’, it allows audience members to insert themselves within the narrative of a song (1990: 197). Or, where a song captures a general feeling rather than a narrative (‘I Should Be So Lucky’), it allows listeners to occupy the subject position of the singer. Although this is a standard trope in popular music, we will return to this in ‘Endurance’, because these types of open-ended lyrics leave the door open for gay reinterpretation, no matter how ostensibly straight the subject matter is. The lyrics are also steadfastly non-sexual in nature. There are no descriptions of ‘wet-ass pussy’ à la Cardi B. Instead, as critic Jeremy Beadle summed it up, the songs ‘are all set in the real province and domain of good pop music, the world where all you need is “your baby” and where love is the thing

Table 1  Lyric perspectives and themes

Second-person (‘you’).

‘I Should Be So Lucky’ ‘The Loco-motion’ ‘Je Ne Sais Pas Pourquoi (I Still Love You)’ ‘It’s No Secret’ ‘Got to Be Certain’ ‘Turn It into Love’ ‘I Miss You’ ‘I’ll Still Be Loving You’ ‘Look My Way’

Third-person (‘he’)

‘Love at First Sight’

Songs which explicitly mention ‘Got to Be Certain’ a male object of desire. ‘Love at First Sight’ Pining for unattainable lover

‘I Should Be So Lucky’

Pining for the lover who dumped me/stood me up/ cheated on me

‘Je Ne Sais Pas Pourquoi (I Still Love You)’ ‘It’s No Secret’ ‘I Miss You’ ‘I’ll Still Be Loving You’

L – Long Player

that matters’ (1993: 239). If we need more evidence of what Beadle was talking about, Figure 2 provides it. Here, we have created a word cloud of all the lyrics on Kylie, in which the most frequently used words appear larger, while words that are used just once appear much smaller. Sure enough, ‘baby’ figures prominently, as do ‘happy’, ‘heart’, ‘believe’, and ‘secret’. This is not just pop music, but also family-friendly music. This partly explains why it afforded pleasure for younger audiences. Even the occasional gestures towards a more ‘sophisticated’ or ‘adult’ persona – as is seen in the French stylings of ‘Je Ne Sais Pas Pourquoi’ – are rendered in a ‘safe’, family-friendly way.

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Figure 2  Word Cloud of the complete Lyrics on Kylie, created using Word Cloud Generator by Jason Davies, 6  May 2022 and used in accordance with the terms published on that site.

Kylie Minogue’s Kylie

The thing about lyrics, of course, is that even the most banal lines can achieve a kind of second life in song. This is why we steer clear of spending much time on analysing the words separately from the melodies, arrangements, and production that gave them shape and helped ingrain them in our minds. We turn now to the music because in our view the music is what helped make Kylie meaningful to audiences. Let us start, then, with one of the most common critiques of Kylie and of the dance music which preceded it: that it is ‘robotic’, inexpressive and inauthentic.

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Music Donald Clarke once described disco as a ‘[d]ance fad of the 70s with profound and unfortunate influence on popular music’ (1989: 344). One of the problems, as he saw it, was that the

L – Long Player

drum machines removed all the swing and soul: after disco, pop songs sounded ‘cluttered’ and featured ‘unswinging rhythm sections’ (1989: 344). This was a familiar tirade often launched by rock fans against disco. What is interesting, though, is that if we listen back to the likes of the Gibson Brothers’ ‘Cuba’, Don Ray’s ‘Garden of Love’ or even The Village People’s ‘Macho Man’, it’s hard to see what Clarke was complaining about. Sure, there were famous outliers like Donna Summer’s ‘I Feel Love’, in which Giorgio Moroder took rigidly sequenced rhythms to an extreme. But much disco music retained – as Clarke put it – ‘the human element’. Chic tracks have a swing and a funk that was good enough for early hip-hop artists to rap over. If anything, Clarke’s complaint makes more sense when levelled against some of disco’s descendants, such as hi-NRG, Detroit techno and … Kylie. Yes, this is in some ways ‘robotic’ music. Minogue’s first album is arguably quantized to within an inch of its life. Contrary to popular belief, SAW’s music was not always this way. Listen to the full version of Lonnie Gordon’s ‘Beyond Your Wildest Dreams’ (the one that lasts 6:48) and you can hear Matt Aitken playing a relaxed, swinging guitar solo from 3:28 onward. Listen to Princess’s ‘Say I’m Your Number One’ and you can hear SAW doing an approximation of eighties funk, complete with synth stabs and a funky bass line that wouldn’t have been out of place on a record by the group Imagination. Listen to SAW’s ‘Roadblock’ (itself a joke aimed at the critics who maintained that SAW sounded ‘robotic’) and you can hear their debt to funk and soul music. Almost none of that funk is audible on Kylie. Hi-hats play perfectly timed – that is, programmed – runs of sixteenthnotes; the kick drum keeps everything metronomically perfect; synthesized hand claps appear on the beat. Picture a grid on

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Kylie Minogue’s Kylie 56

which every beat is sliced up into four parts: any syncopation is strictly confined to this virtual grid. If the kick drum plays oomph, oomph, oomph, oomph, the hi-hats appear at perfectly regular intervals between those drum hits. While many people would describe this as ‘funk-less’, it’s worth remembering that drum machines now effectively connote the dance floor. We ‘have grown used to connecting machines and funkiness’ (Goodwin 1990: 263). One of the reasons Kylie is highly quantized is because of SAW’s roots in hi-NRG dance music. Hi-NRG was an offshoot of disco which emphasized faster tempos and eliminated most of the ‘live’ elements which featured any human error. One of its most famous early exponents was the Northern Soul DJ Ian Levine, who used to DJ at the iconic London gay nightclub Heaven, and who produced Miquel Brown’s ‘So Many Men, So Little Time’ and Evelyn Thomas’s ‘High Energy’ (a song which helped solidify the genre’s name) (Shapiro 2005: 82–4). As we noted in ‘Industry’, some of SAW’s earliest productions were firmly in the hi-NRG style. For example, listen to the extended, eight-minute version of Divine’s ‘You Think You’re a Man’, first released in 1984. Almost immediately, you’ll notice a perfectly quantized kick drum playing a four-to-the-floor pattern with occasional ‘Blue Monday’-esque sixteenth notes, rigidly sequenced cowbells and synthesized handclaps. We only hear one pitch (G) for the first two minutes of the track. From around 1:58 onward, we start to hear a more familiar song, with a verse (‘Turn around …’), an expansive prechorus (‘Then walk away …’), and a chorus (‘You think you’re a man  …’). Dead Or Alive’s ‘You Spin Me Round’ is another example of hi-NRG: both the Murder Mix and the Performance Mix include elaborate build-ups, in which layers are gradually

added to the mix, and corresponding breakdowns later in the track where those same layers are muted, one by one. As late as 1988, SAW continued to use a hi-NRG template for Kylie Minogue’s singles. The Kohaku Mix of ‘The Locomotion’ resembles ‘You Think You’re a Man’: there are so many sixteenth-note cowbells and synthesized electric bass stabs in its first minute that it feels like you’re in a 1985 gay club. As the producers were aware, there was an historically important (though not total) overlap between records which succeeded in nightclubs and records which succeeded on the charts (Stratton 2021: 60). While the number of beats per minute (BPM) on Kylie may appear to be far removed from the hi-NRG template (see Table 2), we would argue that SAW simply slowed down all those quantized patterns without jettisoning them entirely.

Table 2  Approximate indication of beats per minute (BPM) on Kylie.

116

The Loco-motion

129

Je Ne Sais Pas Pourquoi

116

It’s No Secret

100

Got to Be Certain

117

Turn It into Love

116

I Miss You

120

I’ll Still Be Loving You

98

Look My Way

116

Love at First Sight

122

L – Long Player

I Should Be So Lucky

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It’s important to stress the connotations that this highly programmed sound had in 1988. In the 2020s, many pop playlists on Spotify will feature several nods to electronic dance music, whether they be the ‘drops’ of a Rhianna song (Sloane and Tate 2020: 46–52), the synths of Annie or the house beats of Rufus du Sol. Dance music’s ubiquity today makes it easy to lose sight of the extent to which ‘real’ or ‘authentic’ music was once equated with guitar-based rock (Butler 2003: 1–2). One critic recalls what it was like to hear this type of music in 1980s Australia, when guitar-based rock music was very much the norm and music was judged by ‘the pub rock test’: [T]o me, SAW’s music was a revelation. While Led Zeppelin’s ‘Stairway to Heaven’ was relentlessly held up as the indisputable high point of music, the bloated straight boy histrionics left me feeling dead inside. Put on Dead or Alive’s Youthquake album, though, and I would be jolted into another realm; this was something visceral, forbidden and real.

Kylie Minogue’s Kylie

(Denby 2022)

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To be sure, not every element on Kylie is strictly hi-NRG. For instance, ‘It’s No Secret’ features guitar parts (especially at 0:26, 0:36, 1:24 and 1:33) that sound ‘loose’ compared to almost everything on ‘Got to Be Certain’. ‘I Miss You’ has a swing feel. But overall, hi-NRG casts a long dry-ice shadow over Kylie. ‘Turn It into Love’ features a bass line that closely approximates a disco/hi-NRG pattern – that is, eighth notes played one octave apart, as happens at the start of Sylvester’s ‘You Make Me Feel (Mighty Real)’. ‘Love at First Sight’ (not to be confused with the 2002 song of the same name) is effectively a hi-NRG song with most of the hi-NRG percussion and bass stabs removed, leaving a chirpier-than-usual pop song, even by Minogue’s already chirpy standards. You can still hear some hi-NRG elements,

such as the ornamental synth line which runs throughout the verses and is most clearly audible during the middle-eight’s breakdown at 1:55. Having described some of Kylie’s musical details, we want to turn now to one of the album’s biggest hits, ‘I Should Be So Lucky’, because many of the details here illustrate techniques and musical strategies that apply more broadly to the album overall. The Sydney Morning Herald reported that, at one point, several Sydney radio stations removed the song from their playlists, following polling of a sample of people aged twentyfive to forty who described it as ‘childish with a high irritant factor’ (Dennis 1988a: 24). Even sympathetic reviewers draw attention to the ruthlessness with which the chorus is rammed home: The first minute or so is an uncomplicated delight … It’s first playful, then dreamy, then suddenly sad, and then it tumbles into the chorus and everything else in your brain is brutally erased. Then it does it all again – but the payoffs are smaller, the chorus more grating, and more grating still, and the chorus seems to become the whole world. (Ewing 2010)

L – Long Player

T­ he song begins with a few hits from the ubiquitous Linn drum machine (almost every SAW single featured the credit ‘Drums: A. Linn’, a reference to the drum machine). Next comes one of SAW’s trademarks: a piercing, brassy lead synth which plays something like the melody of the chorus. Similar-sounding brass leads can be heard near the start of Jason Donovan’s ‘Nothing Can Divide Us’, and Morris Minor and the Majors did their best to approximate it on their parody record ‘This Is the Chorus’ (produced by ‘Schlock, Aching and Wateringcan’) (1988).

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Kylie Minogue’s Kylie 60

The ‘playful’ aspect that Ewing talks about might have something to do with the underlying chords. Try playing along on a keyboard and notice how quickly the bass line bounces all over the place: in the first eight seconds, the song cycles through the chords F, G, E minor, A minor, D minor, G, C. ‘I Should Be So Lucky’ crams the same number of chords in its introduction that other artists expend on an album. (We are looking at you, Technotronic.) If you’re a musician trying to learn the chords, it is frustratingly fast-moving. For a second (0:04) it sounds like we might be settling on the key of A minor, but just a couple of chords later (0:07) we hear what sounds like a more definitive ‘resolution’ to C major. When the first verse arrives (0:17), we’re suddenly launched into the new musical terrain of A major (which is not even a particularly close relative of C major), and before long (0:33) we end up with what sounds like it might be an ascending key change (compare the ‘imagination’ at 0:17 with the ‘imagination’ at 0:33). Finally, the chorus (0:50) delivers us back to C major. This kind of musicological talk may give the impression that we’re trying to argue for the genius of ‘I Should Be So Lucky’. Listen to all those chords! Marvel at the quick key changes! And yes, there is something to be said for the craft of squeezing these details into the rigid format of a verse-chorus pop song, all the while making the final product sound ‘uncomplicated’ (Ewing 2010). However, our aim here is less to assert that ‘Lucky’ was particularly innovative or creative, and more to point out that Ewing is right: it is indeed ‘playful’. It leads listeners to feel comfortable in one key before jolting them into the next. ‘I Should Be So Lucky’ is also worth paying attention to because of the way that the melody rises to reach the chorus. It starts on A (‘my’, 0:17), moves up to B (‘my’, 0:33) and finally arrives at the almost triumphant-sounding C of the chorus

(‘I  should’, 0:50). As Stock points out, this was a musical trick they often deployed to give songs a kind of ‘lift’: by the time the listener reached the chorus, ‘we’d … been raising the melody up through the scales so that at the point it comes to hit the chorus is the highest point of the song, because there is no point in making the chorus drop. It has got to lift to the climax’ (Egan 2004: 308). It’s worth remembering that other hits from this period include John Farnham’s ‘You’re the Voice’, which takes almost twenty seconds to move from its first ‘chord’ (or rather, its first few notes) to its second. You can hear a similar ‘rising’ technique elsewhere, too. The pre-chorus of ‘Je Ne Sais Pas Pourquoi’ ends with a steadily rising repetition of the word ‘I’ (1:04), and the tension created by the underlying chords is resolved at the start of the chorus, when the harmonies return to the tonic or home base of the song – in this case, G major. This technique is, in fact, an example of what we noted Walser identifying earlier: an ‘invocation of longing’ (Minogue’s voice reaches higher, higher, higher, the chords stray from the song’s home) and the achievement of some kind of fulfilment (the return to the song’s harmonic home). All of this brings us back to SAW’s self-perception as traditional songwriters. They may have been steeped in dance music, they may have drawn on hi-NRG (and later house) patterns for their grooves, but at the heart of their output were songs in the traditional sense: [W]e as writers are old fashioned in the sense that we always determined chords, rather than starting from somebody just singing something and then fitting it around, which I think a lot of DJ-types today would tend to do: give you the beat

L – Long Player

like to start from a chordal, harmonic sequence of pre-

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and a focal note and hope that the singer actually develops something which you can pin stuff around. That’s not really songwriting. (Egan 2004: 309)

This ‘traditional’ approach to songwriting will be important when we turn to the music’s longevity in ‘Endurance’.

Kylie Minogue’s Kylie

Plotting

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Whatever epithets Kylie attracted, perhaps the most undeniable one was that it was accessible. One reason for this is that the PWL team ‘plotted’ tracks: that is, they used an existing song as a template for a new production (Harding 2010: 149). Often, several songs were plotted simultaneously: a new PWL song might recreate the groove of an existing song, while drawing the chord progression from another song. Bananarama’s ‘Venus’ is an example of this approach. The 1969 song had been a huge hit for Dutch group Shocking Blue, reaching the Number One spot in the United States in 1970. According to PWL producer Phil Harding, SAW initially recorded a version that was relatively faithful to the Shocking Blue version, and Bananarama asked for it to sound ‘more like Dead or Alive’, which resulted in the heavy use of the cowbell and other Linn drum sounds on their 1986 version. Similarly, the groove of Rick Astley’s ‘Never Gonna Give You Up’ is loosely based on Colonel Abrams’ 1987 song ‘Trapped’. A later Minogue track, ‘I Guess I Like It’ (1992) uses an adapted version of the synth riff from 2 Unlimited’s ‘Get Ready For This’. Plotting is handy if you want to capture the sound of an existing track without directly sampling it. Some critics would see this as further evidence of creative bankruptcy: every

L – Long Player

song is a rewrite of another song. But we’d suggest the more important point here is that plotting gives songs an instant familiarity that is important for reaching new audiences. We don’t want to make any claims about direct influence, but we think it’s fair to say that both SAW and the wider PWL staff had their ears to the ground, and this is audible on Kylie’s album tracks. By 1988, it is clear that the PWL team (or perhaps Pete Waterman specifically) had a firm idea of which formula worked best: a sound that foregrounded four-to-the-floor drums and largely sequenced instrumental parts. We can find evidence for this in the fate of Rick Astley’s ‘She Wants to Dance with Me’. The original version was produced by Phil Harding and Ian Curnow, and a number of session musicians provided instrumental parts. Upon delivering this first mix to Pete Waterman, the latter made two main requests: to replace the syncopated kick drum with a four-to-the-floor programmed drum, and to replace the bass guitar with a typical PWL programmed bass line. The song went on to become the first Astley hit composed by the singer himself. This is perhaps a sign of PWL’s success: by 1988, producers and mix engineers were being asked to replicate earlier PWL hits. It is no coincidence, therefore, that the main singles from Kylie are the ones that most closely fit the PWL template. In terms of beats per minute, ‘I Should Be So Lucky’, ‘Got to Be Certain’, ‘Je Ne Sais Pas Pourquoi’ all hover around the 116 mark, and all of them foreground the programmed synths, the Linn drum machine and disco-inspired four-to-the-floor drums. The only tracks to deviate from that formula were the non-single album tracks. ‘Look My Way’, for instance, is one of the few songs on Kylie which does not include a stomping kick drum on every beat of every bar.

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‘Look My Way’ also demonstrates that the PWL team had their ear to the ground when it came to producing tracks in line with current sonic fashions. For example, listen to some ’80s funk/RnB tracks, and you’ll soon encounter the kind of drum programming on ‘Look My Way’, one where the song is unambiguously in 4/4 time but the kick drum is no longer prominent on every beat of the bar. Here, the typical PWL kick pattern (oomph-oomph-oomph-oomph) is replaced with a kick-and-snare pattern (oomph-chak-oomph-chak). For other examples of this type of rhythmic feel, listen to Luther Vandross’s ‘I Really Didn’t Mean It’ (1986), Rick James’s ‘You Turn Me On’ (1984), or Midnight Star’s ‘Midas Touch’ (1986).

Kylie Minogue’s Kylie

Extended Versions

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In this section, we want to talk about some of the Extended Versions of songs from Kylie. Why do this? It’s tempting to make a case for their inclusion on the grounds that they appear on some reissues of the album, such as the 2015 box set (catalogue number: KYLIE 1 X), and that future reissues will most likely include them too. For better or worse, the record company imperative to milk its back catalogue for all it’s worth means that there will always be a fresh ‘Deluxe Edition’, a new remaster, or a new box set to purchase, and many of those reissues will gather remixes into the fold. We could also make the case that PWL Records was, at least initially, heavily beholden to 12-inch singles: in the mid-1980s especially, PWL’s main stock-in-trade consisted of this format. Stock notes: ‘[W]e only ever thought we were doing singles … Kylie was the only one where we really took a bit more care. The first two or three albums, because we realized she was special’ (Egan 2004: 312).

L – Long Player

Many of SAW’s most famous tracks were originally produced as seven-minute club tracks, to be later edited down to a more radio-friendly length. But we’re talking about these remixes for a different reason: SAW’s extended versions give us an opportunity to hear more clearly what went into the LP versions of the songs. One of the distinguishing features of PWL Records’ output was the extent to which all remixes were handled in-house: songs might be sent to a different PWL studio for a remix (in some cases, to be reworked by Phil Harding and Ian Curnow), but it was rare for PWL to commission remixes from third parties. Whether intentional or not, one side-effect of this in-house treatment was that many remixes did not markedly tamper with the ingredients of the song. For example, if you were to drop the needle onto the middle of ‘Got to Be Certain (Extended)’, you would hear something very similar to the LP version or the radio edit that you may have already heard on television. As the musicologist Mitchell Morris has put it, ‘disco’s normative form can be interpreted as a verse-chorus pop song with significant instrumental expansions’ (2013: 115), and SAW 12-inch singles largely continued this tradition. The 12-inch versions are especially useful for our purposes here because they feature many sections in which layers are muted – this allows us to hear more clearly how many layers are present and what some of those formerly masked layers sound like. The extended versions of ‘I Should Be So Lucky’ and ‘Got to Be Certain’ illustrate this well. ‘Lucky’ begins with at least two distinct synth lines: the lower-pitched one plays a Moroderlike pattern of sixteenth notes. It’s Moroder-like in the sense that it plays a familiar disco trope: two sixteenths of each note followed by two sixteenths one octave higher. The higherpitched line keeps repeating a pattern that revolves around

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Kylie Minogue’s Kylie 66

the notes B and C. It is this second synth line which, in our view, sounds like a hook (Burns 1987): a ‘musical phrase that stands out and is easily remembered’ (Monaco and Riordan 1980: 178), and more recently as something that can ‘encompass all parts of a pop song’s music and production’ (O’Regan and Byron 2023). We would tend not to describe the Moroder-esque line the same way because it functions more like a rhythmic underpinning to the song proper, regardless of how catchy it may sound. From 0:00 to 0:58, SAW gradually add layers to the track, one or two at a time. Some of those layers are percussive (a kick drum at 0:04, a snare at 0:07); others consist of pitch material (a bass line at 0:16; additional chords at 0:25; synth pads at 0:41). At two points, they introduce what is arguably another hook – a mostly descending synth fill at 0:40 and 0:48. But that opening line (the B and the C) remains throughout the section. The other layers compete with it in the mix without overwhelming it. And this is the important point: when the song ‘proper’ begins at 1:02, when all the layers enter the mix (even that decidedly uncool brass lead), the ‘B + C’ line is only a shadow of its former self; it is no longer foregrounded, but has instead been relegated to its usual place in the radio version of the song. Now for the magic trick. After listening to the first minute of this extended version, go back and listen to the original, and you’ll notice that the ‘B + C’ line is actually there, almost completely masked by the other instruments. So is the Moroder-esque line, along with all the other layers that the extended version had carefully assembled in front of us. And that, perhaps, is the point of this listening experiment. Listening to the humble 7-inch versions of the singles, we can

L – Long Player

hear or notice a lot more detail after having heard the stratified build-up of the extended version. ‘Got to Be Certain (Extended)’ achieves something similar. In Table  3, we have mapped out some of the layers we can hear in the opening minute of the track. This is not intended to be an exhaustive list – without physically being in the studio at the time, it is difficult to identify every layer as some may be masked in the final stereo recording. But the list does give us a sense of the number of layers at work here. We are well aware that many of these sounds are generated by a Linn drum machine. To make each layer easier to identify, we have described them in some cases as the instruments they are imitating (‘kick drum’; ‘conga’) or we have mentioned the TV theme that they resemble (‘Seinfeld-like synth bass’). Our overriding aim here is to make sure that readers are following the same sounds we are hearing, and we have therefore taken some liberties with chronology (for instance, referring to a ‘Seinfeld-like synth bass’ even though Seinfeld emerged in 1989). We have also deliberately only indicated layers the first time they appear, rather than adding, say, every iteration of a reverse cymbal crash. By 1:09, we have basically launched into the familiar LP version of the song. And, just as we heard in ‘I Should Be So Lucky’, a surprising number of these layers are present in the three-minute-nineteen-second LP version of ‘Got to Be Certain’. The 12-inch version of the song helps us hear just how much has been crammed into the LP version. What’s remarkable about ‘Got to Be Certain (Extended)’ is that some of those ‘hidden’ layers – for instance, the synth chord progression at 0:18 – sound like they could have been the main hook of their own pop song.

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Table 3  ‘Got to Be Certain (Extended)’ layers

Kylie Minogue’s Kylie

Time

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Layer

0:00

reverse cymbal crash

0:02

bass drum

0:02

hi-hat

0:03

hand claps

0:05

conga

0:06

conga with reverb

0:10

single shaker hits

0:18

synth chord progression

0:25

Seinfeld-like synth bass

0:35

bass line proper

0:35

16th-note bass line

0:35

cymbal crash on second beat of the bar

0:42

descending synth fill

0:51

Strings

1:07

chorus melody synth

1:09

brass lead synth

Notes

panned left

panned right

lower frequencies than Seinfeld-like synth bass

beginning on the note B similar to synth heard at beginning of ‘I Should Be So Lucky’

In our view, ‘extended version’ is a particularly apt name for these kinds of tracks because, in most cases, once the stratified introduction is out of the way, the music largely – though not entirely – reverts to the familiar version from the album. Most elements of the arrangement are still in place; the bass parts play the same lines; the hooks are all present and accounted for; most of the verses still lead into a bridge which still leads into a chorus. The song is extended rather than

being re-composed from the ground up. Not all the remixes of Minogue’s singles took this approach. Some, such as ‘Je Ne Sais Pas Pourquoi (The Revolutionary Mix)’, branched out a little further from the single version to include new pitch material and new vocal and percussion samples. ‘Je Ne Sais Pas Pourquoi (The Revolutionary Mix)’ is based on a nearunchanging bass line heavily influenced by the same kind of Chicago house music that had provided the template for early Mel & Kim tracks such as ‘Showing Out (Get Fresh at the Weekend)’. As Phil Harding notes, this is unusual because the bass riff actually gels harmonically with most parts of the song: perhaps ‘not musically-correct enough for a 7-inch radio version, but absolutely fine for the club version that we were doing’ (2010: 303–4). In short, then, Kylie represents an interesting combination of musical traditions, drawing from 1980s dance music and older songwriting traditions. Its 12-inch offshoots give some insight into each song’s ingredients (some of which are masked in the LP versions), and the album overall is a good example of the well-oiled machine that PWL Records had become by 1988. In the next chapter, we situate the album within a couple of broader contexts – in particular, the Australian and international music industries.

L – Long Player 69

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­I – Industry Kylie was a huge success for many parts of the creative industries. Obviously, record sales were huge, as were live shows, associated television (Neighbours) and even brands that Minogue promoted such as fashion label Sportsgirl and teen-focused deodorant Impulse. Marcus Breen argued that ‘Popular music helped generate cultural nationalism as part of Australia’s social and political discourse of the 1980s’ (1999: 54). In 1988, the bicentennial of the colonization of Australia by Britain, Minogue was even responsible for helping with the industry of Australian nationalism. She appeared at various bicentennial events as a clear international marker of aspirational Australia at the time – a white, blonde, suburban, middle-class, heterosexual woman. Around this time, in 1987, John Farnham, also a singer who had started as a pop icon, was named the Australian of the Year. In terms of nationalism, Minogue’s fit within a particular demographic was important, perhaps even more so than her early talent. As the National Film and Sound Archive said of her appearance at the Royal Bicentennial Concert in 1988, ‘Wild applause accompanies Kylie Minogue’s entrance on a pink convertible at the Royal Bicentennial Concert … Even this early in her singing career Kylie’s magnetic presence on stage is evident, despite it being obvious that she is miming the song’ (Taylor 2021: online). The industry that both loved and hated Kylie Minogue was the music press (including print, radio and television). Those who thought she was terrible continued to spew bile because any talk about Kylie tended to attract attention and, therefore,

Kylie Minogue’s Kylie

precious ratings and advertising spend. As discussed, the press loved to hate Kylie, and Minogue personally, as part of a larger tradition of really loving to hate the fans that pop attracted. These critiques were clearly gendered (Cavicchi 1998: 6), and this patronizing perspective is part of the reason Minogue and her fans were positioned as ‘young’, as explored in the last chapter. Key figures in the Australian and international music industries had definite plans with Kylie. Piggy-backing off the popularity she had from Neighbours, they knew that anything attached to Minogue would have an audience interested and willing to pay. As covered in earlier chapters, these fans were by no means respected by these industries (at least, that is the clear impression given by the way they were talked about), but their money was just as good as anyone else’s. While ‘the press and the fans’ differed so widely in their opinions, ultimately this showed that the press was wrong. Public opinion was not reflected by middle-aged cis men – or at least, not only represented by them. Minogue’s success arguably led to growing acceptance for future artists who transitioned from TV star to pop star. For example, when Delta Goodrem, also a Neighbours actor, was signed to Sony at 15 in 2000 and went on to have huge local and international success as a musician, her reception from the press was much less frosty.

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The Australian Industry – Mushroom Records The Australian success of Kylie proved that pop music made by local artists could make money. Importantly, when stories about Minogue’s success have been told, they are often used as evidence of Mushroom founder Michael Gudinski’s superior

I – Industry

business sense rather than Minogue’s talent. This is most obvious in Breen’s study of the Australian music industry, Rock Dogs. Here, Breen apparently dedicates an entire chapter to Minogue, ‘A Kylie Story: Inner City to Mushroomville’ (1999: 54– 74), but actually spends the majority of the time talking about Australian nationalism in music at the time of the Kylie release. It’s not until thirteen pages into the chapter that Minogue is discussed in any detail, with Breen using this time to set up the context of Men at Work and Midnight Oil as artists pushing Australian nationalistic rhetoric through lyrics while being supported by major record labels. What made Kylie stand apart was what Breen called a ‘universalism of Kylie’s claim … linked to the incremental progression of Australian popular music’ (Breen 1999: 67). He continued to frame the success of the album, and Minogue as an artist, as a move away from ‘national symbols with local appeal in the cases of Men At Work and Midnight Oil, to denational symbols, where universal ideals like love and emotion are not constrained by local references’ (Breen 1999: 67). Breen also noted a genre shift with the mainstream financial success of Kylie, explaining that while ‘rock was considered to rely on a set of established practices based on musicianship and a relationship with the audience, pop was a disposable image of little lasting value’ (Breen 1999: 67). Notwithstanding the mistaken claim that pop does not build an audience relationship, and that themes like love are not able to be localized, there is a disclaimer added: ‘[T]his binary reading cannot be neatly applied to popular music in the 1990s, although it helps explain Kylie, whose music was simplified dance music with little apparent lasting value, but international appeal’ (Breen 1999: 67). As we show in our chapter ‘Long Player’, there is lots to be learned, and still enjoyed, from ‘simplified dance music’.

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Kylie Minogue’s Kylie 74

Gudinski used Kylie to build up his independent, but rockled, Australian label Mushroom Records. The label’s early tagline, ‘Mushroom Records – Australia’s Rock Plant’, made their genre preference clear, as did their early roster led by glam rockers Skyhooks and Split Enz. Completely male and overtly heterosexual, any possible question that being ‘theatrical’ as a euphemism for queer was quashed, literally by Skyhooks with album title and song ‘Straight in a Gay Gay World’ (1976), and stylistically by Split Enz whose look and sound were called ‘Sergeant [sic] Peppers meets Roxy Music’ (Warner 1998: 45). While both Skyhooks and Split Enz did draw attention for extravagant stage dress, they were aligned with experimental international rock artists rather than any pop or disco trends (read – possible connections to being ‘kinda girlie, kinda gay’). A driving musical distinction was that where synths were used: they were only ornamental; both bands still heavily featured driving guitars and thumping drums on key singles – particularly Skyhooks’ ‘You Just Like Me ‘Cos I’m Good in Bed’ (1974) and Split Enz’s ‘I See Red’ (1979). There were female artists on Mushroom during this time – most notably soul/rock artist Renee Geyer – but they were very much in the minority. Gudinski wasn’t interested in Minogue for her talent or credentials, but for the quick cash she could generate. In recalling this time Breen was so explicit about Gudinski’s motivations and the financial impact that Kylie had on the local industry that in the ‘Kylie’ chapter of Rock Dogs much more attention is given to Gudinski than Minogue. Very clearly, Breen saw Kylie as the financial making of Mushroom even though before 1988 the record company had been very culturally important for building the local music scene through rock music. Breen quoted Gudinski, saying, ‘The company [Mushroom] itself didn’t really start to make decent money and start to stand on

I – Industry

its own two feet until Kylie Minogue, Jason Donovan and the whole pop phenomenon’ (Gudinski in Breen 1999: 68). Creswell and Fabinyi described the feeling at Mushroom that Minogue’s would be ‘a novelty record’ as ‘Gudinski was unsure about the teen market’ but encouraged colleagues at the label to take her on after being ‘moderately amused by the clip’ for ‘Locomotion’ (1999: 167). Calling it ‘the first big pop-culture move in a generation’ (Creswell and Fabinyi 1999: 168), they noted how, via Mushroom, seemingly the entirety of ‘the rest of the [Neighbours] cast [had] record deals thrust at them’ (Creswell and Fabinyi 1999: 168). Creswell and Fabinyi acknowledge that ‘none of these acts made the iron-clad connection with the public that Kylie did’, suggesting this was because she simply ‘had the sense to know her limitations [as she] left the records to experts and concentrated on what she did well, which was perform in promotional videos’ (Creswell and Fabinyi 1999: 168). Cresswell and Fabinyi did concede that there was an ‘honesty  … at the core of Minogue’s success and [this was] a factor in the failure of the wannabes’ (Creswell and Fabinyi 1999: 168) – but even this concession seems patronizing. Mushroom was not a pop label, and ‘it was well known that Michael Gudinski is a rock fan, not a pop person at all’ (Warner 1998: 67). At one point, the label even saw fit to release a parody record by Dave and the Derros (‘Death to Disco’ (1978)). This antipathy towards pop has meant that the genre’s, and indeed Minogue’s, place on the label was often misunderstood. Even in the twenty-fifth anniversary retrospective of Mushroom Records, Minogue’s association with Neighbours was dismissed, with biographer Warner saying ‘far from being a help to recording artists, TV exposure had always, in this country, been seen as a hindrance’ (Warner 1998: 67). Such comments omit that up until this point much of Mushroom’s (rock) roster had

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boosted its audience through exposure on the ABC TV music program Countdown. This was yet another example of how there were different rules for rock and pop, and specifically different rules for Minogue. Minogue was well aware of Mushroom’s position on pop, and in particular Gudinski’s stance. Although she was often outwardly supportive and thankful to him and Mushroom, on rare occasions Minogue also called out Gudinski, and by extension the Australian music industry generally, for their bias. In her 2011 ARIA Hall of Fame acceptance speech she clearly explained this, saying: My start in the business was a non-conventional one … When I signed with Michael, The Big G, I don’t think anyone at Mushroom Records could spell ‘pop’. Maybe they could spell it but they sure as hell weren’t going to say it .… It was like a dirty word, it wasn’t played on the radio, it wasn’t cool, it wasn’t anything. And it was the last thing that people would expect to hear from a soapie actress. Nevertheless I, as a pop fan, was beside myself with excitement to be releasing my first record.

Kylie Minogue’s Kylie

(Minogue in NFSA 2011: 10.00–10.46)

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What is left out of this account is that it was actually a woman working at Mushroom, Amanda Pelman, who signed Minogue to the label. When Pelman was acknowledged, her work was nevertheless framed in terms of Gudinski: ‘[I]t was Pelman and Gary Ashley who had the most to do with Kylie becoming part of the Mushroom stable … It must be said, however, that Gudinski’s trust in the judgment of his staff was critical’ (Warner 1998: 67). Even more shocking is this description, attributed to manager John Watson: ‘[Gudinski] is the man who employed the woman who signed Kylie Minogue’ (Coupe 2015: 186). Sigh. Signing Minogue to Mushroom did come after an initial contact made by Gudinski, but hardly with any actual endorsement. As

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Pelman recalled, ‘One fine afternoon Michael Gudinski walked into my office, literally threw a tape on the desk and said “have a listen to this and see what you think” and walked out’ (Pelman in Creswell 2003: 190). The tape was a demo of Minogue singing ‘Locomotion’, which Pelman praised as ‘a fantastic song and she [Minogue] sang it brilliantly’ (Pelman in Creswell 2003: 190). Interestingly, in his biography of Gudinski, Coupe connects Pelman and Minogue in terms of their shared experiences as young female fans of popular music, understanding the ability of music to inspire ‘a kid in a bedroom [to] hold her hairbrush high and sing’. This is an important part of Kylie’s appeal (2015: 181). Coupe makes it clear that this fan experience informed Pelman and Minogue’s professional lives, suggesting that fans of Minogue would also sing into their hair brushes just as ‘Pelman had done as a kid as she listened to the music of The Monkees and the Partridge Family. And it was exactly what Kylie had done to the music of ABBA and Olivia Newton-John’ (2015: 181). Not unlike the connection made with fandom between Minogue and Meldrum discussed in the chapter ‘Kinda Girlie, Kinda Gay’ – this type of professional relationship built through a shared belief in certain kinds of pop music is telling as again it presents this music as ‘othered’, in much the same way as The Monkees, Partridge Family, ABBA and Olivia Newton-John have been othered. In this account of Gudinski’s relationship to pop, and to women in the industry in general, Coupe recalls Pelman’s recruitment to Mushroom. He writes, ‘Gudinski recognised talent in Pelman and gave her as much responsibility as he thought she could handle.’ This is framed as a compliment, as Coupe continues ‘as [Gudinski] had done before and would do afterwards with women in the company, an approach that was at odds with the misogynist attitudes prevalent in other record companies’ (2015: 174). On the same page, the job interview

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to hire Pelman is also recalled, where out of four questions to check her suitability for the position Gudinski reportedly asked Pelman if she had a car, if she was married, and ‘are you going to have kids’ (2015: 174). In the 1960s, this may have been seen as appropriate. For instance, female Australian public servants were prohibited from getting married until 1966 (Sawer 2016). It is telling that this kind of attitude persisted in the 1980s. Gudinski passed away in 2021 and Minogue’s name was often included in obituaries for him. Minogue herself appeared at his public memorial service and performed a version of ‘Locomotion’ live on stage with Ed Sheeran, encouraging the audience in the room and at home to sing along ‘and remember where it all began for me’. Michael Gudinski had been fundamental to launching Kylie via his Mushroom connections. Along with her longtime manager Terry Blamey, they saw the commercial opportunity posed by the target audience of young girls in particular. And yet, Gudinski repeatedly said he didn’t expect the appeal to last (and perhaps, even Minogue herself, to last in the industry), but instead saw the initial spark and market opportunity, and wanted very much be on board for it. To be fair, in the decades that followed, Mushroom, under Gudinski, significantly broadened its genre and gender split.

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The international industry – PWL Records and SAW

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So far, we’ve established that Minogue’s pop-and-danceoriented music was, at least initially, out of step with the rest of the music promoted by Mushroom Records. The same cannot be said for her UK label, PWL Records (Pete Waterman Limited). PWL had much firmer roots in dance music, openly courted

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chart success and usually focused more on producing pop singles rather than albums. The dominant PWL sound of the late 1980s was strongly associated with the songwriting and production trio, Stock, Aitken and Waterman (SAW). SAW were one of the most successful British songwriting and production partnerships of the 1980s. They wrote and/ or produced a series of hits for artists such as Dead or Alive, Bananarama, Rick Astley, Mel & Kim, and Donna Summer. In Australia, their debut single for Astley (‘Never Gonna Give You Up’ (1987)) was the best-selling song of the 1980s. According to Stock, the trio made ‘more than 100 Top 40 singles. If we’d put all these records out under one name we would have been bigger than … The Beatles’ (2004: 6). SAW’s approach was initially Tin Pan Alley-esque, where relatively anonymous songwriters had their songs performed by a string of young, photogenic stars. While they came together in 1984, their work was particularly ubiquitous from 1988 to 1990. SAW produced most of the tracks on Minogue’s first four albums: Kylie (1988), Enjoy Yourself (1989), Rhythm of Love (1990) and Let’s Get To It (1991) (the latter produced by Stock and Waterman). Her hits from these albums – including ‘I Should Be So Lucky’, ‘The Loco-motion’, ‘Never Too Late’ and ‘Better the Devil You Know’ – appear on most of her major Greatest Hits compilations such as Ultimate Kylie (2004), The Best of Kylie Minogue (2012) and Step Back in Time (The Definitive Collection) (2019). This means that Minogue’s early hits are inextricably entwined with the success and the critical reception of SAW themselves, who by the late 1980s were no longer faceless Tin-Pan-Alley-style producers for hire, but were increasingly becoming household names themselves, as evidenced by compilations such as The Hit Factory: The Best of Stock Aitken Waterman Volume 2 (1988).

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Many critiques of Minogue’s early musical output have been, in effect, critiques of SAW. Critics took aim at SAW’s production methods, their assembly-line approach to pop production, their instrumental palette, the ‘sameness’ of their recordings and their heavy reliance on musical formulas, among other things. After listening to a marathon 100 SAW tracks, an NME writer noted, ‘[H]ooks, beats, basslines and sometimes whole songs get recycled across their catalogue’ (NME 2012). However, the common perception of PWL as a seamless, slick ‘Hit Factory’ where formulaic tracks were cynically foisted on an unsuspecting public is undercut by several details. For example, as we’ll illustrate below, the only reason Kylie was released on the independent label PWL was because at least three established record labels refused to sign her – hardly a demonstration of an effective money machine in action. The marketing ‘department’ of PWL boiled down to ‘one girl called Kelly’ (Waterman doesn’t provide her surname) who would pick fashionable clothes for artists to wear. Much of the image management, if you want to call it that, was left to Mary Calderwood, the editor at Smash Hits magazine, who was a fan of SAW productions and would regularly meet with staff from the record label to gather material for stories in her magazine. Waterman notes: ‘[iI]f you want to know who had the strongest vision for the way that the artists were presented to the public, it was Mary Calderwood at Smash Hits. We never had anything to do with any of that’ (2000: 181). All of these details give a slightly more complicated picture of the industry. That is, they suggest that there was no grand plan to make Minogue a massive success. Her success, in fact, was the result of many disparate factors coming together almost haphazardly. One of those factors was, of course, the songwriting team. Mike Stock performed his first live gig in 1976, and was soon

Matt and I developed, playing on stage, sets of other people’s hits. We were playing thirty or forty songs in an

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playing eight gigs a week (two on Sundays) at a range of working-men’s clubs. Accompanying himself on keyboard, he played cover versions of the type of songs that he had grown up with – ‘By the Time I Get to Phoenix’, ‘Theme from A Summer Place’ – and recalls the importance of giving the audience what they wanted (heavy rock was a no-go). He eventually teamed up with guitarist Paul Challenger to form a group named Mirage, which subsequently expanded to become a five-piece. Mirage also played under the name Nightwork, and under this moniker they performed Stock’s original compositions. Around 1981, Stock auditioned a potential new guitarist for the band, Matt Aitken. As Stock tells it, he was impressed by the fact that Aitken turned up to the audition in a suit. More importantly, Aitken had just finished working as a guitarist on cruise ships, a gig which required a musician to be flexible and to have a near-encyclopaedic knowledge of pop-rock sounds. In his audition, Aitken played the guitar parts of songs such as A Taste of Honey’s ‘Boogie Oogie Oogie’ and Gloria Gaynor’s ‘I Will Survive’. Pete Waterman, too, had a background which gave him a firm grasp of pop music fashions. He was a Northern soul DJ who had worked as a record distributor and A&R consultant for several record companies. In 1982 he signed the reggae group Musical Youth and future pop star Nik Kershaw under his own company Loose Ends (Stock 2004: 30). The trio’s musical backgrounds undermine criticisms that their success was ‘easy’. In fact, despite the heavy use of programmed instruments on many of their hits, they could be said to have undertaken the same kind of musical training – live gigs in pubs and clubs – as many rock musicians (Homan 2000: 33–4). As Stock puts it:

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hour-and-a-half. You’ve got to keep people dancing. You can’t stop and take a breath. So you’re segueing things. (Egan 2004: 301–2)

This constant immersion in other people’s hits gave them a strong sense of what ‘worked’ in a pop song: how a shift from a minor to a major key could give a song a ‘lift’; how to discreetly shift the key downwards at the start of the second verse – techniques that would serve them well in songs such as Cliff Richard’s ‘I Just Don’t Have the Heart’ (1989) and Lonnie Gordon’s ‘Happenin’ All Over Again’ (1990). SAW’s first record presaged several aspects of Minogue’s music: it was commercial (albeit not commercially successful) and it privileged the producers. Simon Frith has argued that pop music ‘is not driven by any significant ambition except profit and commercial reward’ (2001: 96), and there are clear echoes of this idea in Stock’s description of the trio’s first record: So, what was our big idea? Well, we had come up with the scheme of launching a female version of Frankie Goes To Hollywood. Why not? Someone had to do it! Matt and I would write the song and then go into the studio with the two girl singers who were prepared to front our brilliant concept.

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(Stock 2004: 29)

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The artist name for the record would be Agents Aren’t Aeroplanes, and the ‘song’ would be called ‘The Upstroke’. We’ve deliberately placed the word ‘song’ in scare quotes, because ‘The Upstroke’ was less a song and more of a track, in which verses and choruses take a backseat to a series of riffs, quasi-chants and drum machine programming. The debt to Frankie Goes to Hollywood was clear from the very start. The performers were almost an afterthought: it was Stock

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and Aitken who came up with the concept and produced the record. In a similar fashion, Frankie’s debut single ‘Relax’ was already recorded by the band when producer Trevor Horn was brought on board. Horn’s first move was to eliminate everything but the vocals and start from scratch, building up new textures with the help of a Fairlight sampler. It was not just the workflow that Stock and Aitken took from Frankie Goes to Hollywood, either. The sound of ‘The Upstroke’ itself is Frankie-esque. Notice, for instance, the synth bass line at the start – it is basically the same one-note riff, played by a similar synthesized bass guitar. Even the cover art mimics that of the Frankie record. Instead of verses, choruses, middle-eights and so on, we hear a chant which has been set to music. There are long stretches where not much happens aside from the pummelling kick drum, that familiar synth bass, and regular interventions from synth hand claps. From the 1990s onwards, the idea of a producer-led record with little to no discernible star profile became more common. For instance, DJs such as Paul Oakenfold and Mark Ronson enjoyed chart hits fronted by ‘featured’ singers. However, both Stock and Waterman faced difficulties trying to get signed to record labels. In the early 1980s, record companies still expected to see ‘a band’. That, in fact, was one of the reasons that Stock and Aitken sought Pete Waterman’s support. Stock recalls that when they presented Waterman with ‘The Upstroke’, Waterman ‘got it immediately. Understood what we were trying to say. Didn’t want to see the band, knew it was created in the studio’ (Egan 2004: 291). While ‘The Upstroke’ reached Number 60 on the UK charts, the success of other early SAW recordings (such as Princess’s ‘Say I’m Your Number One’ and Dead or Alive’s ‘You Spin Me Round’) cemented the trio’s status. Recognizing the need for all members of the team to be equally invested in

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Kylie Minogue’s Kylie 84

the trio’s fortunes, Stock and Aitken agreed to split songwriting credits with Waterman, even though – according to several accounts – Waterman’s main contributions lay outside the studio. That is, Waterman brought clients to the studio for Stock and Aitken to produce. As Stock puts it: ‘Pete himself isn’t a producer in the sense that I’d call a producer. He’s a bit more like a film producer. He puts people together’ (Egan 2004: 290). It was Waterman, among others, who was responsible for bringing Minogue to Stock and Aitken’s attention. At the request of Mushroom Records, a PWL engineer by the name of Mike Duffy had been sent to Australia to help Platinum Studios operate their new SSL (Solid State Logic) mixing desks. While in Australia, Duffy had produced a cover version of ‘Locomotion’ for Minogue, trying as much as possible to emulate the sound of PWL Records. The single had reached the Number One position on the Australian charts, and Duffy had been called upon to produce a follow-up. The only problem was: there was no follow-up. Mushroom wanted someone to write new songs for Minogue, and Duffy had already ‘used his one trick’ (Waterman 2000: 172). This is how Minogue arrived at PWL Studios. The first meeting between the songwriters and the singer did not augur well. Waterman had apparently forgotten to tell Stock and Aitken to expect Minogue in their studios, so when Minogue finally arrived for her first recording with Stock and Aitken, she was already due to fly back to Australia the same afternoon, and Stock and Aitken had no song prepared. Stock apologized for the mix-up and immediately rang Waterman, who confessed to having forgotten about the whole affair. According to Stock and Waterman, ‘I Should Be So Lucky’ was written in less than an hour, Minogue recorded her vocals quickly and immediately returned to Australia.

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That rough version of the song was shelved while Stock and Aitken moved on to work on another artist. It was not until the PWL Christmas party that a DJ named Pitstop played ‘I Should Be So Lucky’ (a version with added backing vocals and a fuller arrangement). The track immediately got Waterman’s attention: ‘Bloody hell – this is a smash hit!’ Waterman brought ‘I Should Be So Lucky’ to several record labels, by his count, at least three. Nobody was interested. So, against his better judgement, he decided to release the song on his own fledgling label, PWL Records. Interestingly, PWL producer Phil Harding writes that the phone conversation between Mike Stock and Pete Waterman may have actually been apocryphal (2010: 121). He doesn’t go into details, but it’s possible that Waterman was not answering calls on the day in question. If this is the case, it raises the question of why such origin stories emerge and why they have such staying power. We would suggest that such stories can have several functions. First, they can emphasize the speed at which SAW were accustomed to working (quick, we need a song because Pete forgot to tell us about this soap star!). Second, they can emphasize the inauthenticity of the production. That is: Minogue’s music does not emerge ‘organically’ from legitimate artists, perhaps jamming on a piano and guitar. It emerges almost as part of a business transaction that has been arranged in advance by a manager (in this case, Terry Blamey) and a record-company figure (Pete Waterman). Whether the story is true or not is almost beside the point: what matters is the effect the story has on how Minogue is subsequently received. Phil Harding has argued that records such as Kylie actually triggered a decline in PWL’s fortunes. Put simply: these records represented a ‘pop turn’ which brought vastly increased sales

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at the cost of PWL’s credibility ‘with the UK dance scene and the important DJs in the UK and USA who had got us to where we were by late 1987’ (2010: 104). He continues: For me, once we lost that credibility with DJs, it was a downhill road, regardless of the pop success. We were forced to do a U-turn by PW [Pete Waterman], during 1989–1990, once he realised how important it was to get that credibility back. That’s why you heard numerous ‘trendy’ remixes of the Kylie record on her second and third albums.

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(2010: 104)

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Waterman goes even further, saying that ‘the worst thing that ever happened to PWL was Kylie Minogue’ (2000: 191). While he clearly appreciates the amount of money that Minogue generated, he takes the view that it would have been better if PWL and SAW had ended their relationship with Minogue after the first album. That would have allowed PWL to pick up where they had left off and continue to make dance records, without losing credibility amongst DJs and clubbers (2000: 191). We agree that PWL lost credibility with DJs by 1988, but we do not see this entirely as a consequence of Kylie Minogue’s success. Rather, with the emergence of acid house in 1987, dance music began a steady and inexorable move away from song-based subgenres. In the 1970s, few people would have dismissed a disco track as ‘not really dance music’ because it happened to feature lyrics. But by the late 1980s, as Neil Tennant of the Pet Shop Boys notes, ‘the pop song was under threat in a way that it had never been before, because dance music became so prominent and it wasn’t about songs – a lyric would just get in the way’ (Graham-Brown 2001). Given Stock and Aitken’s self-description as ‘traditional songwriters’, it’s unlikely that they would have continued to have hits within

UK dance music culture, even if they had severed all ties with chart-friendly pop stars. In the period from 1984 to 1987, they could make successful dance records because ‘dance music’ still overlapped with songs – just think of hi-NRG songs such as Lime’s ‘Babe We’re Gonna Love Tonight’ (1982) or Italo disco songs such as Baltimora’s ‘Tarzan Boy’ (1984) and Fun Fun’s ‘Colour My Love’ (1984). It would have become more and more difficult to succeed in nightclubs after the emergence of acid house, Detroit techno and other subgenres, a point we explore in more detail in the next chapter, ‘Endurance’. The legacy of SAW’s productions continues to be unpacked in new media forms such as the insightful podcast series Chart Beats: A Journey Through SAW (2022).

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­E – Endurance Music often moves up and down a cultural hierarchy (Walser 2003: 25–6). It becomes (to quote Mel & Kim) more or less ‘respectable’ over time. Works that were initially intended to be ephemeral – ‘powerfully meaningful in a particular time and place, with no expectation that they would or should appear elsewhere’ (Walser 2007: 512) – are later turned into enduring, ‘timeless’ works of art thanks to the efforts of critics, scholars, musicians and others. For example, disco was widely maligned in the late 1970s but has since been redeemed in some critical circles: note the careful track curation, remastering and attention to liner notes on compilations such as Disco Discharge. In some ways, the status of Kylie, too, has perhaps changed over the years. If the album has endured, this is at least partly due to the audience that has most vociferously embraced it: that is, the gay male community in countries such as Australia and the UK. This chapter explores why this connection exists between Kylie and gay culture. It should be stressed that Kylie appealed to many different markets and audiences; there is no one way of reading the album. Even within a particular culture (such as gay male culture) there are hundreds of potential interpretations of Minogue’s work. Furthermore, even when we analyse specifically gay responses to Minogue’s music, those responses often speak about elements of her star persona or of the music which can and does appeal to a larger audience. The tunes are catchy, the lyrics are relatable and the arrangements are full of hooks. These features help to explain why Kylie sold well in

general; they do not explain why a particular community – gay men – gravitated towards and even adopted the songs. In this chapter, we try to explain Kylie’s endurance by exploring how it has become a part of gay culture.

The gays If you have a quick browse of Spotify’s LBGTQ-themed playlists, it doesn’t take long for Kylie Minogue to pop up. As at February 2022, Minogue appears three times on a playlist called Gay Clubbing 2022, three times on a playlist called GAY PRIDE and fourteen times on a playlist called Gay Hits of the 2000s | Pride Party. Her association with gay male culture is so overground that her gay following manages to be simultaneously taken for granted and yet rarely explained. It is commonplace to describe Kylie Minogue as an iconic figure in gay culture, but less common to see anyone explaining this connection. For a good example of this simultaneous acknowledgement/ disavowal, you only need to look at the story ‘The (Gay) Cult of Kylie Minogue’, which appeared in the gay male street press in 2015. In the article, several Minogue fans step up to provide some answers to the perennial question: ‘what is it with gay men and Kylie?’ Here is a sample of their responses: No other female star has been around for the amount of Kylie Minogue’s Kylie

time Kylie has and remained classy, sexy and sophisticated.

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A lot of her female pop peers have resorted to tacky tactics to stay relevant or in the spotlight. I appreciate and respect that about Kylie, she doesn’t cross the line that some others do, like when they make controversial or political statements just to get into the headlines. Kylie keeps it classy.

It’s the fashion and the music. She’s perfection – and the gay community have impeccable taste. She’s the ultimate showgirl. She’s been beaten down and got back up … again. She beat that horrible disease and came back better than ever. She’s a survivor and an icon. We gays love that stuff. (Abrahams 2015)

All of these responses are, of course, valid. But they also raise new questions. If Minogue’s gay appeal can be traced to her staying power, then why do so many of these gay men report being a fan since her days in Neighbours – that is, since long before Minogue had any staying power? If the appeal is about the star surviving cancer, why was ‘I Should Be So Lucky’ a staple in gay clubs? If the appeal is about her ‘staying classy’ and avoiding controversy, why not gravitate instead towards Olivia Newton-John? Despite the questions above, these fans at least try to explain why there is such an association between Minogue and gay men. It’s worth stressing this because some commentators dismiss the question. For example, in the same article, psychologist Dr Amy Lykins states: Why question a good thing? She likes it, the men like it – it works well for everyone … [A]t the end of the day does it really matter to either Kylie or her fans? … I think that what you’re describing is pretty harmless. People enjoy what they enjoy. (Abrahams 2015) E – Endurance

E­ven Minogue herself has adopted a similar approach of acknowledgement/disavowal. That is, she enthusiastically acknowledges her gay following: ‘[T]hey’ve been with me through thick and thin … and probably adopted me when

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Kylie Minogue’s Kylie

it was my most uncool period’ (NFSA 2006: online). But when questioned about why she has this following, she answers: ‘I don’t know and I kind of don’t want to know; do you really want to know how a magic trick happens?’ (Abrahams 2015). If we listen to Minogue’s later music, it is easy to identify moments that have been important for gay male audiences. For instance, much of her music has drawn on heavily gayidentified genres, of which disco is just one. Her 2001 single ‘Your Disco Needs You’ uses a butch male choir in the style of The Village People’s ‘In the Navy’ (not to mention Pet Shop Boys’ ‘Go West’ and ‘A Red Letter Day’). Her 2020 album was simply titled Disco. It not only used the kinds of string sections that are widely associated with disco (listen to ‘I Love It’, for example), but also drew on other gay-identified genres such as house: notice the opening piano riff on ‘Magic’, or the filter sweep in the first twenty seconds of ‘Miss A Thing’. In case the gay signifiers weren’t clear enough, the 2021 ‘Guest List Edition’ features a collaboration with none other than Gloria Gaynor, the woman who sang ‘I Will Survive’. Listening to Minogue’s later music, there are plenty of nods to a gay male audience. Our question here is: why might the very first album have endured as part of gay culture? Later in this chapter, we will discuss why the lyrics on Kylie afford a gay reading. But first, we turn to the sounds themselves.

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Excess ­ s we mentioned in ‘Long Player’, Kylie has its roots in a very A gay-identified genre – hi-NRG. It is part of a tradition going back to Divine and early Dead or Alive. The songs on Kylie were club-friendly. That is, when they appeared as 12-inch singles,

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the music was specifically designed to fit in with what DJs were playing at the time. The singles play at 116–17 beats per minute (except for the faster ‘Loco-motion’); a drum machine underpins all the songs; the extended versions of the singles begin and end with DJ-friendly drum loops or other types of breakdowns. The music’s base in dance music meant that several of these songs would have become the soundtrack to many young gay men’s nights out, in a way that was not the case for Cold Chisel or Crowded House. But another important aspect of the music was a certain type of excess, a type of over-the-top-ness which many critics have identified as being part of gay culture. We have already cited Creekmur and Doty’s reading of The Wizard of Oz, in which they referred to ‘the film’s fantastic excesses (color, costume, song, performance, etc.) … expressing the hidden lives of many of its most devoted viewers’ (1995: 3). There are parallels here with Kylie: the songs have endured in gay culture partly because of their excessiveness. What, exactly, was ‘excessive’ about those early Minogue singles? The mere fact that all of Minogue’s early 12-inch singles featured songs was, in its own way, excessive. As we’ve noted earlier, what we now call ‘electronic dance music’ had started to shift away from song-based subgenres by the late 1980s. By 1989, ‘the PWL sound was … ignored by most of the club scene apart from the commercial “Mecca” club scene … and the gay club scene’ (Harding 2010: 161). Many of the dance subgenres of the late 1980s and early 1990s (acid house, Detroit techno, jungle, gabba and so on) had no place for melancholic lyrics about love and loss. They had no place for lyrics at all. The 12inch versions of ‘I Should Be So Lucky’, ‘Got to Be Certain’ and the rest were excessive in that they foregrounded the very elements from which straight clubbers were increasingly distancing

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Kylie Minogue’s Kylie 94

themselves. The gay street press tellingly referred to Hithouse Jack’s track ‘Dance to the Sound of the Underground’ as ‘[a]nother in the “collage House music” epidemic we are all suffering from’ (Holden 1988b: 16). Kylie is full of conventional songs which draw on conventional harmonic tropes (for example, the upward ‘lift’ of a key change) and conventional romantic lyrics. For critics such as Gilbert and Pearson (1999), dance music which delivers such ‘easy’ pleasures – that is, music which conforms to well-established conventions of Western music – has often been dismissed as not being ‘real’ dance music. They use the example of Euro-house, but much of what they say applies equally well to the extended version of ‘Got to Be Certain’ or ‘The Loco-Motion (Kohaku Mix)’. One of the reasons that this music is not taken seriously is because it is widely ‘viewed as being too easy’ (1999: 76, emphasis in original). It is music which uses ‘shamelessly crowd-pleasing tactics’, which ‘emphasize[s] melody and narrative’ rather than exploring unusual textures (whether that be an acid squelch or a pitch-bending ‘hoover’ rave synth) or exploring different configurations and interplays between various percussive elements. This is the sense in which we hear Kylie as being excessive: it was too easy – too melodic, too cheerful, too tearful – for club culture of the time. That type of excess has an obvious appeal in gay male culture. When critics attacked SAW music as ‘escapist’, the journalist Richard Smith retorted that ‘queens’ (his term) should not feel guilty about reveling in escapist music: ‘Yes, pop is a palliative, but it stops us from cracking up just as much as it calms us down’ (1995: 40). Minogue’s singles worked in gay clubs because they cheerfully refused the dictates of dance music’s tracks: they had no time for ‘the underground’ and they were unafraid of being classed as commercial. They were, to put it differently, a welcome

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respite from the ‘serious’ dance music that straight people at the time were gravitating towards. Little wonder, then, that Minogue (and Bananarama and all the other PWL stalwarts) constituted the playlist of so many gay male nightspots in the late 1980s (Thornton 1995: 99). There are other types of excess in Kylie. For example, there is the near total domination of major keys in these songs. To be clear, it is misleading to simplistically equate major keys with ‘happiness’ and minor keys with ‘sadness’ (Tagg 1982: 49): listen to Fonola Band’s version of ‘Tarantella Napoletana’ and you’ll hear a piece in a minor key that sounds anything but gloomy. Nonetheless, it is telling that almost all of Side A of Kylie is written in major keys, even – or especially – when the lyrics focus on cheating boyfriends, or non-existent boyfriends. There is the excessive, almost childlike repetition of key phrases  – ‘I Should Be So Lucky’ was surely deemed to have a ‘high irritant factor’ by those radio station surveys because of its relentless repetition of the word ‘lucky’, itself a clear throwback to earlier Europop groups such as ABBA, with their ‘Money, Money, Money’, ‘Honey, Honey’, ‘I Do, I Do, I Do, I Do, I Do’, and ‘Gimme! Gimme! Gimme!’ titles. There is also the excessive quantization of virtually all instruments, which we discussed in ‘Long Player’. Stock and Aitken insist that they ‘played’ all the instruments on their records, but a more accurate way of putting it is that they and their engineers programmed all the instruments. Today, of course, few people bat an eyelid at the sound of rigidly quantized pop music. Indeed, tastemaker sites such as Pitchfork celebrate the Moroder-esque precision of songs by Robyn. But in 1988, the rockist position that you had to express yourself – you had to have something to say, you had to say it authentically – was still in full flight (Butler 2003: 1–2), and the

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heavy use of drum machines and synthesizers was still heard as a form of ‘fakery’ (Frith 1986: 267). It may sound like a stretch to link a purely musical decision – ‘let’s quantise that drum pattern’ – to the audience’s sexuality. But there is no such thing as a ‘purely musical’ decision in the first place. Each cowbell, each synth riff and each stuttered vocal line comes with connotations already attached (Tagg and Clarida 2003: 12–14), whether we are conscious of them or not. And in 1988, heavily synthesized pop had definite connotations of non-standard sexuality: real men listened to rock, and the rest of us embraced other sounds. The irony was that rock was every bit as studio-produced and technologydriven as dance music (Dyer 1990). Walter Hughes’s comments on disco also apply just as much to Kylie: [E]ven the subtler critiques of disco implicitly echo homophobic accounts of a simultaneously emerging urban gay male minority: disco is ‘mindless’, ‘repetitive,’ ‘synthetic,’ ‘technological’ and ‘commercial’ just as the men who dance to it with each other are ‘unnatural,’ ‘trivial,’ ‘decadent,’ ‘artificial’ and ‘indistinguishable’ ‘clones’.

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(Hughes 1994: 147)

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Many of these insults idealize another form of music in the shadows. When critics attack disco for being ‘synthetic’ and ‘commercial’, they usually have an ‘organic’ and ‘autonomous’ alternative in mind. Another way of putting this, of course, is that we are talking about the old distinction between ‘authentic’ rock and ‘inauthentic’ disco, a distinction which was effectively debunked by Dyer back in 1979. Kooijman notes that several critics have tried to rehabilitate disco by implying that it was ‘authentic’ after all (2005: 261–2). For instance, Butler’s re-appraisal of the Pet Shop Boys’ ‘Go West’ positions

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that song as ‘an authentic expression of an important musical and cultural tradition’ – that of disco and gay liberation (Butler 2003: 13). The problem, for Kooijman, is that we haven’t really broken down the authentic-inauthentic binary: we’ve simply added disco to the ‘authentic’ side of the equation. What makes disco – and by extension Kylie – important for many audiences is not that the album is ‘authentic’. True, as we noted above, some of the lyrics seem to speak to a gay sensibility. But that is not the only way that people enjoy the album. Another way is to revel in its artificiality. In some circles, Kylie’s excessiveness might be read as camp. We don’t want to get into long-running debates about what does and doesn’t count as ‘camp’ (see Moore and Purvis 2018; Cleto 1999). Suffice it to say that ‘camp has always involved striking a pose, an impulse toward the theatrical, and a manifestation of doubleness (of character, of identity, of emotion, of intent, of interpretation, of meaning)’ (Moore and Purvis 2018: xiv, emphasis in original). There are two types of doubleness we want to briefly mention here: doubleness of intent and doubleness of interpretation. The doubleness of intent is clear in the selling of Kylie. As Smith points out: ‘[t]he SAW boys are clever guys who know their market and who know that a pretty considerable chunk of it consists of gay men. They cater and even pander to this and as a consequence have given us lots of good faggotty pop’ (1995: 40). As we noted in ‘Long Player’, SAW had previously produced several records explicitly aimed at gay male nightclubs (‘The Upstroke’, ‘You Think You’re a Man’, ‘You Spin Me Round’), and it seems unlikely that they would have pitched the early Minogue material without noticing its potential resonance with gay male audiences. Kylie was made with one eye on the pop market and another eye on the gay

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market. Stock, at least, appears to have had a keen sense of writing for two markets: My assessment of gay men is that they tend to be sensitive and like songs that move them. [M]y songs have always been about human relationships, love and romance, loss and longing. And they are emotional subjects that have always appealed to gay men and to women. If 20 per cent of the male population is gay and 50 per cent of the entire population is female – then, as songwriters, we’ve got at least 60 per cent on our side! (2004: 70)

Kylie Minogue’s Kylie

So there is a doubleness in the intent of these songs. But, perhaps, more interestingly, there is a doubleness in audience responses to Kylie: like a lot of pop music, the album is heard as both catchy and ridiculous. The popular music scholar Simon Frith writes that we ‘can and do despise pop music in general as bland commercial pap while being moved by it in particular as a source of sounds that chime unexpectedly but deeply in our lives’ (Frith 2001: 96). We would suggest that Kylie is part of gay culture partly because audience responses collapse the two approaches that Frith mentioned: this is music that some people heard as ‘bland commercial pap’ which also resonates with gay men’s experience. That resonance can be traced not just to the musical decisions on the album, but to the lyrics, which we explore in the next section.

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Fantasy As we mentioned in ‘Long Player’, Kylie makes heavy use of second-person lyrics, which make it easier for listeners to occupy the subject position of the singer. True, the lyrics make

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it clear that Minogue is singing to a boy (see ‘Love at First Sight’). But at the same time, all the ostensibly ‘heterosexual’ lyrics are no longer quite so straight when anyone can sing along. The lyrics set up a scenario or fantasy that anyone can inhabit. Songs such as ‘Got to Be Certain’ and ‘I Miss You’ have what we might call ‘gay affordances’: they make sense as massmarketed pop music, but the exact same lyrics can be sung from the point of view of someone experiencing same-sex desire. This of course also worked for the young audience who had no experience of sex. The lyrics are also important because of the number of times Minogue sings about being mistreated by men: they stand her up (‘Je Ne Sais Pas Pourquoi’), they end relationships (‘I’ll Still Be Loving You’) and they cheat (‘It’s No Secret’). Sometimes, the mistreatment hasn’t even happened yet but Minogue worries about it anyway (listen to the second verse of ‘Got to Be Certain’). These songs recall the British journalist Richard Smith’s observation that gay men embrace artists such as Minogue because ‘they know what it’s like to be continually crapped on by crappy men, or to have given your heart to someone who never asked for it’ (1995: 41). If the ambiguous ‘you’ pronouns leave the songs open to being appropriated by gay men, the content (with all these stories of frustrated love, or unavailable love) implicitly encourage such gay identification. So far, we have identified the open-ended nature of the lyrics (the ‘you’ pronouns), and the subject matter (you’re cheating, you’re leaving, you haven’t shown up) as potentially speaking to a gay male position. But there is also a third layer to these lyrics which affords a queer reading: the importance of fantasy. This is most noticeable on the album’s most enduring single, ‘I Should Be So Lucky’. ‘Lucky’ is an extended daydream: Minogue laments the fact that the object of her desire does

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not reciprocate her love. There is a similar theme running through ‘I Miss You’, in which she pines for a far-away lover, stares at his photograph and so on. The key words that pop up in these songs are ‘dream’, ‘daydream’ and ‘fantasy’. As Hennion points out: The frequent use of the direct style where, for example, the ‘I’ addresses itself to the ‘you,’ even though it is obvious from the lyrics that the ‘you’ in question is far away, instantly gives the song the form of a fantasy, of a daydream in which a character speaks aloud to someone who is not there. (Hennion 1990: 197)

Why would this kind of ‘fantasy’ lyric be particularly open to gay interpretation? Why might it speak to a ‘gay sensibility’ (Dyer 2004)? There are several things to bear in mind here. As Dyer points out, very few people are raised to be gay. In fact, ‘everything in the culture seems to work against it’ (2004: 153). The comedian Mark Normand quips that when a young boy declares that he ‘hates girls’, the boy’s parents typically respond: ‘Oh, you’ll like them some day.’ Importantly, many gay men learn very quickly that most of the men we see are not available as sexual objects, a tendency that stays with us. As David Halperin puts it: Even as adults, we do not escape the awareness that, in the eyes of most men, we fail to qualify as possible candidates Kylie Minogue’s Kylie

for either sex or love. So our desire for men, in many cases,

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is impossible from the start, impossible as such. It is therefore infinite, and necessarily confined in the first instance to fantasizing about them. We develop, early on, a habit of communing with imaginary lovers, and it is a habit we never quite abandon. (Halperin 2012: 229)

So, as Dyer points out, gay men generally begin their lives in a heteronormative world, and Halperin adds that they don’t simply shrug off the training in heterocentrism that they received as boys. In many cases, this sense of difference – the idea, for instance, that most men are not available as potential partners – becomes a defining feature of gay men’s adult lives. The ‘habit of communing with imaginary lovers’ becomes a part of gay men’s approach to mainstream culture. It is what leads to a particular type of relationship with Hollywood films, with Broadway musicals, with soap operas or with pop songs. For instance, William Baker, Minogue’s stylist and close friend, writes that he was a typical ‘teenage homo … with delusions of grandeur and dreams of a huge mansion and a warring extended family’, so he ‘was gripped by the American supersoaps of the eighties’ (Baker and Minogue 2002: 20). While Neighbours may have appeared to represent more ‘ordinary’ lifestyles, there was still a clear middle-class affluence here which could well have had the same kind of allure. It comes as no surprise, then, that the more sympathetic reviews of Minogue’s early hits draw attention to the unavailability of romance in a way that might resonate with a gay audience. They consequently highlight the melancholy aspects of her upbeat music. Here, for example, is a comment from Jeremy Beadle’s account of 1980s pop music: The downtrodden, ill-treated, patient, slightly tacky Kylie image was perfectly judged, so much so that the Greatest Hits album almost manages to tell a story. Songs like ‘Je ne sais pas pourquoi’, ‘Hand on Your Heart’, and ‘Better the the heart of anyone who’s ever had a crush, especially an unrequited crush. (Beadle 1993: 239, emphasis added)

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Devil You Know’ are memorable, singable, and go right to

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Smith goes further: Stock, Aitken and Waterman have consciously enriched British gay male culture. Thanks to them we can cry along with Kylie, swoon over Jason, laugh at Big Fun, or scream our proverbial tits off with Bananarama. Gay men who slag off SAW just don’t know how lucky, lucky, lucky they are. (1995: 42, emphasis added)

These comments begin to explain why Minogue’s lyrics are so rich in potential gay (re-)readings. Even before they identify as ‘gay’ or recognize themselves as experiencing same-sex attraction, many gay men learn to appreciate these elements of popular culture: their experience resonates with tales of unrequited love, with the melancholic, overly sentimental stories told in particular pop songs.

Kylie Minogue’s Kylie

­Not all gays love Kylie Minogue

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We’ve established why the downtrodden persona of Kylie songs, with their melodramatic and gushingly sentimental lyrics, might have a certain queer appeal. The ‘unrequited crush’ was, in the past, almost baked into the early experience of many gay men and pre-gay boys, and Minogue’s first album is full of unrequited crushes, or fantasy men, or men breaking her heart. Similar arguments have been made about earlier forms of music, and about homosexuals in previous decades – that is, prior to the flourishing of various gay liberation movements. For example, in his essay on the Broadway musical, D. A. Miller argues that the subjective experience of homosexuality  – particularly in an era when gay sex was not so readily available – was that of ‘solitude, shame [and] secretiveness’ and

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an ‘excessive sentimentality that was the necessary condition of sentiments allowed no real object’ (Miller 1998: 26). We need to acknowledge two important criticisms that have been made about this kind of argument in the past. First, loneliness and sentimentality may have been a part of gay male experience in 1952, but that type of experience no longer applies to most gay men in Western democracies. Second, any claim about so-called ‘gay culture’ is essentialist and largely inaccurate. With regard to the first criticism, we should start by saying: we acknowledge that gay men are not always sad and lonely, are not always victims, and are not always pining for unattainable relationships. This may have been true of earlier generations of closeted gay men obsessed with Broadway musicals, but was less true at the time that Kylie was released, and is even less true today. We have moved ‘beyond the closet’ (Seidman 2002), and to imply that gay men are still weeping into their martinis, singing along with Judy Garland (or Kylie Minogue, for that matter) because she ‘knows what it’s like to be crapped on by crappy men’ (Smith 1995: 41) might feel regressive. Surely gay men have moved beyond such stereotypes, and surely they had moved beyond them by 1988? Well, yes and no. ‘Progress’ in the achievement of LGBTQ+ rights is uneven, so it is misleading to plot clear milestones in the history of queer life (Dyer 2002: 1–2). The experience of an openly gay man living in Darlinghurst in 1988 might have been radically different to that of a man experiencing same-sex desire in a regional Australian town (Connell 2000). Moreover, in both politics and popular culture, the 1980s were a time of conflicting messages regarding homosexuality. In the late 1980s, the Sydney Gay and Lesbian Mardi Gras could attract up to 120,000 spectators and involve more than sixty floats

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Kylie Minogue’s Kylie 104

(Carbery 1995: 100). The 1980s Top Forty included songs such as Bronski Beat’s ‘Smalltown Boy’ (1984), Joe Jackson’s ‘Real Men’ (1982) and the Weather Girls’ hyper-camp ‘It’s Raining Men’ (1982) (Morris 1999), indicating some level of tolerance (though not necessarily acceptance) of male homosexuality. Yet at the same time, male homosexuality was still criminalized in Australia in the 1980s. For example, male homosexual acts were not decriminalized in New South Wales until 1984 (Wotherspoon 2016: 235), and were not decriminalized in Tasmania until 1997 (Medhora 2018). ‘Gays’ were still treated as a potential threat in public service announcements on broadcast television, to be carefully distinguished from the rest of ‘us’ Australians. For instance, in a notorious television advertisement of 1987, the Grim Reaper played ten-pin bowling, using a giant bowling ball to mow down human beings. The stern voiceover intoned: ‘[A]t first, only gays and IV drug users were being killed by AIDS. But now we know every one of us could be devastated by it.’ The subtext was clear: ‘[A]t first, only gays and IV drug users were being killed by AIDS [so there was no need for us to worry]. But now we know everyone one of us [normal, non-deviant, straight people] could be devastated by it.’ The gay street press, such as the Sydney Star Observer, frequently documented police harassment of gay men (Sydney Star Observer 1988: 1). All this reflects the fact that the 1980s were not yet some kind of halcyon period for queers. We cannot assume that in 1988 the default experience of gay men (and pre-gay boys) would have been entirely free of homophobia, or would have involved a seamless transition from closeted adolescence to out-and-proud adulthood. The second criticism of any discussion of ‘gay culture’ is that it is potentially essentialist: it wrongly assumes that all gay

men automatically embrace sentimental pop songs, Broadway musicals, American soap operas and various other elements of popular culture. In response to this, the gay scholar David Halperin makes an important point: there is a difference between a culture and the people who happen to inhabit that culture: Just because you’re French doesn’t mean you have to like wine and you can refuse to drink a drop of wine and still be French […] At the same time … to be French is to be alert to the cultural meanings of wine drinking, to have at least some kind of attitude to the practice of wine consumption and appreciation, even if it is an attitude of total indifference or rejection. (2012: 129–30, emphasis added)

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­ alperin’s position is important because it is, if anything, antiH essentialist. He makes it clear that gay men do not automatically gravitate towards the likes of Kylie Minogue. Rather, in certain milieus, in certain places, and in certain times, men who identify as gay need to adopt some kind of position in relation to Kylie Minogue, even if that position is to say ‘I’m not that kind of gay’. When Mark Simpson panned everything that 1990s gay culture stood for – vacuous buff white guys dancing in tootight spandex shorts – he derisively name-dropped Minogue: ‘[T]he Coming of the Kingdom of Kylie is something that most gays can hardly wait for. A world of free love and shirtless men with their hands in the air showing you their shaved armpits is something really to look forward to’ (1996: 10). Even though he rejects mainstream gay culture, he still – inexorably – needs to position himself in relation to that culture. The Sydney Star Observer may have published a vitriolic review of ‘I Should Be So Lucky’ (Holden 1988a: 17), but they also saw fit to run

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Kylie Minogue’s Kylie

multiple reviews of the same song across a number of weeks. David Hiscock, DJ at the gay venue the Newtown Hotel, wrote: ‘Kylie, you scream! You either love or hate her – there doesn’t seem to be an in-between. Well, love or hate her, this new single is going to be a massive hit’ (Hiscock 1988: 25). Even while acknowledging Minogue’s critics, it made sense to Hiscock to include a review of the single: to adopt a position in relation to Minogue. All of the above partly explains why elements of preStonewall gay culture endured in the 1980s, and perhaps endure to this day. In many cases, queers actually prefer to ‘remak[e] non-gay material’ rather than consume the openly, explicitly gay products that are specifically aimed at them (Halperin 2012: 110). There are undeniable pleasures to be had from embracing the films, the songs and the books that are not necessarily aimed at you, or that you enjoy in a nonstandard way. This helps to explain how Kylie belongs to a thing called ‘gay culture’. Even though it occupied a space in the mainstream, even though it never mentions homosexuality, it manages to resonate with a kind of queer sensibility.

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­Outro We promised you that this book was about Kylie. But we also promised you that it was about fans of that album – in particular, the young, often female or gay fans who were not always taken seriously in the world of 1980s Australian pop music. We remain fans of this album, and we want to end with our own stories of how we first encountered Kylie songs. We’ve deliberately left these stories to the end, in recognition of the fact that we’re just two of many fans who went on to be in the industry in one way or another.

Adrian’s story: Listen carefully to the 12-inch Long before I heard Kylie, I bought the 12-inch single of ‘Got to Be Certain’. By 1988 I was familiar with ‘extended versions’ and I knew what to expect. There would be a long, drawn-out introduction; the ‘guts’ of the song would make an appearance at some point; later, there would be a breakdown (although I didn’t know that term yet) where instruments would disappear and then reappear in the mix. What I didn’t realize was just how much would be crammed into ‘Got to Be Certain’. Hearing a PWL 12-inch single is like having a window into the studio: each stem or instrumental layer is presented separately, one layer at a

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time. In effect, the extended mix becomes a lesson in how to assemble hooks. This is not the only type of recording or performance that has that effect: ‘Memphis Soul Stew’ by King Curtis & the Kingpins has a comparable, stratified introduction, in which different instruments are introduced one by one. Dance bands of the 1920s and 1930s would break the texture down in a similar way (Thornton 1995: 59). But ‘Got to Be Certain (Extended)’ was surprising because, on first listen, it sounded like I was hearing all manner of new material – not least the opening synth riff. It was only when I flipped the record over and listened again to the radio edit that I realized: all that extended stuff was already in the regular 45. It had simply been camouflaged by the sheer busy-ness of the music. So, my initial interest in Kylie Minogue was purely musical. I was more interested in synth hooks than her outfits; I didn’t collect posters of the star. Nonetheless, in 1988, some parents may have wondered about the significance of a twelve-yearold boy purchasing multiple Kylie records (not to mention Sylvester’s ‘Do Ya Wanna Funk’). My parents never did, and I never made the connection myself between being a Kylie fan and being gay until much later, when I noticed Minogue’s ubiquity in gay male clubs. That started me wondering: where does the gay male obsession with female pop stars come from? This backstory helps explain my interest in the album Kylie. On one level, it’s worth exploring what made those songs fun to listen to in the first place. But there are also important questions about why these songs – sung by a straight woman, produced by straight men – seemed to appeal to a gay sensibility more than many other explicitly gay songs on the charts.

Liz’s story: Learning to take pop seriously

­Outr

­ y Dad had bought Kylie on vinyl for me. Although it was M mine, he catalogued the record as he did everything in his (our) collection, giving it a descriptor and number. A former radio DJ, this was his way to understand and value music – and as part of the process he made notes about genre, track lengths and points of interest like high chart positions. Once the cataloguing was done, the album was placed carefully on the shelf with the rest, to be kept upright, dry and in order for easy retrieval next time. Remember, this was the late 1980s, well before you could search for a streaming service or just Google something when you wanted it. Dad’s system remained for decades, and when I became a journalist and then music academic I’d still often ring him to ask for verification about a particular release. Metadata on Discogs was never as reliable as Dad’s typewriter and texta adaptations. Dad classified Kylie under ‘FV’ for ‘Female Vocal’, then he made a large white label which he stuck to the front cover of the album. This label included a track listing, notes about song durations and a ‘Biggest Hits’ section which he would update and re-attach to the album as Kylie’s career progressed. The first on his list of ‘Big Hits’ was ‘The Loco-Motion’, which, according to Dad’s typewritten note taking, went to Number Two in the UK and Number Three in the United States. Also on this list were three more tracks from Kylie: ‘I Should Be So Lucky’, ‘Got to Be Certain’ and ‘Je ne sais pas pourquoi’, each also with chart positions. Following were key moments from Kylie’s recording career up to 1994’s ‘Confide In Me’, from here either Dad, or I, or both of us lost interest as a grungier side took over Kylie, and actual grunge took over for me.

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Kylie Minogue’s Kylie

Dad was very pleased with his effort, although I have to admit I was a bit disappointed with how unceremoniously he placed the label over her face. Perhaps it was an accident, or perhaps it was a way to put out any potential fires – telling me, even then, to listen to the music rather than focus on a pretty face. Dad did leave Kylie’s cascading hair and hat visible – for years I pined for blonde hair dye and a tight perm to replace my own boring brown loose waves (see Figure 3).

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Figure 3  Liz Giuffre’s copy of Kylie, complete with her Dad’s cataloging. Copyright Liz Giuffre.

Returning to Kylie, as it existed for me in our house then, has reminded me of lots of things. It has reminded me of the way I was taught to take pop music seriously – that Kylie could be as worthy of attention as any other artist or genre. Haters in the press and the playground were making fun of Kylie, and by extension, they were making fun of fans like me, a then-eightyear-old girl. I was so lucky to have found joy in that music, and to have had that joy taken seriously. It was one of the greatest gifts I could have ever been given.

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Index ABBA 51, 95 Abrams, Colonel 62 acid squelch 94 Agents Aren’t Aeroplanes 82 AIDS 104 Aitken, Matt 55, 81, 83–5, 86–7, 95 Allen, Peter 15, 42 Anderson, Angry 40–1 Annie 58 ARIA 1, 5, 45–6, 76 Ashley, Gary 32, 76 Astley, Rick 62–4, 79 audience. See young girls, gay men awards 1, 5, 6, 9, 12 ‘Babe We’re Gonna Love Tonight’ 87 ‘bad’ music 8–9, 49–51, 54–5, 89, 96 Baker, Sarah 36 Baker, William 101 Baltimora 87 Bananarama 32, 62, 79, 95, 102 Bandstand 42 Barnes, Jimmy 38–9 Beadle, Jeremy 52–3, 101 Beatles, The 36, 49, 50, 79 beats per minute (BPM) 57, 58, 63, 80, 93

Bee Gees, The 42 ‘Beyond Your Wildest Dreams’ 55 Bicentennial (Australia) 71 Blamey, Terry 78, 85 Breen, Marcus 71, 73–5 Brown, Miquel 56 camp 94, 104 Cave, Nick 7–8, 38 Chart Beats: A Journey Through SAW (podcast) 87 ­Chic 55 Chicago house 12, 69 children’s music 33, 35, 44 Cold Chisel 24, 25, 38–9 ‘Colour My Love’ 87 Countdown (TV Show) 22, 38, 44, 76 criticism 2–4, 6, 20–1 Crowded House 93 Cumhead, Eddie 25 Curnow, Ian 63, 65 Daddo, Cameron 44–5 Dead Or Alive 12, 56, 58, 62, 79, 83, 92 Diesel, Johnny and the Injectors 16 Dion, Celine 49 Disco (2020 album) 1, 92

disco (genre) 24–5, 27, 54–5, 56, 58, 63, 65, 74, 86, 89, 92, 96–7 Divine 12, 25–6, 56, 92 Donovan, Jason 18, 21, 22, 26–7, 39–41, 43, 44, 59 Drum Media, The 46–7 Dyer, Richard 27–9, 96, 100–1, 103 Eilish, Billie 12 extended version 34, 56, 64–9, 93, 94 ‘faggotty pop’ 97 Fairlight sampler 83 Farnham, John 61, 71 Finn, Neil 38 Frankie Goes to Hollywood 82–3 Friends of Charlene 26–9 Friends of Dorothy 27–8 Fun Fun 87

‘I Feel Love’ 55 ‘I Just Don’t Have the Heart’ 82 ‘I’ll Still Be Loving You’ 53, 57, 99 ‘I Miss You’ 53, 57, 58, 99, 100 ‘I Should Be So Lucky’ 7–8, 79 lyrics 52–3, 93, 95, 99–100 music 57, 59–61, 63, 65–7 music video 35, 52 origins 84–5 radio play 4 Italo disco 87 ‘It’s No Secret’ 53, 57, 58, 99 James, Rick 64 ‘Je Ne Sais Pas Pourquoi’ 52, 53, 57, 61, 63, 69, 99, 101 Kennett, Chris 50 Kylie gay appeal 90–102

Index

gay men 8, 9, 11, 13, 25, 27–9, 90–2, 94–106 Gaynor, Gloria 81, 92 gender and music industry 8, 13, 19, 37, 38, 43 Gordon, Lonnie 55, 82 ‘Got to be Certain’ 57, 63, 65, 67–8, 94, 99 lyrics 27, 35, 52–3 ­music video 34–5 Grim Reaper TV advertisement (Australia) 104 Gudinski, Michael 31–2, 74–5

Halperin, David 100–1, 105–6 Hangin’ Tough 49 ‘Happenin’ All Over Again’ 82 hair blonde 34, 71 perm 34 Harding, Phil 62, 63, 65, 69, 85, 93 Henderson Kids, The 42 ‘High Energy’ 56 hi-NRG 56–7 homophobia 15, 37, 104 Huber, Alison 17 Hutchence, Michael 5–7, 38

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hi-NRG elements 57–9 lyrics 52–4, 98–102 music 54–69

Index

Led Zeppelin 58 L­ et’s Talk About Love 49 Lil Nas X 13 Lime 87 Linn drum machine 32, 59, 62, 63, 67 ‘Locomotion’ (Mike Duffy production) 84 chart success 2, 32, origins 77 press coverage 3 ‘Loco-motion, The’ (SAW production) 79 chart success 2 lyrics 53 music 57, 93–4 music video 33–4 ‘Love At First Sight’ 29, 52, 53, 57, 58, 99

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Mac, Paul 24 Madonna 1, 18, 21 Mel & Kim 69, 79, 89 Meldrum, Ian ‘Molly’ 22–3, 44, 77 Men at Work 15, 43, 73 Midnight Oil 15, 25, 73 Minogue, Dannii 43 Mirage 81 misogyny 6, 15 Moroder, Giorgio 55, 65, 66, 95 Morris, Mitchell 65, 104 Morris, Russell 42

Mushroom Records 13, 31–2, 72, 74–8, 84 music industry 1, 4, 5, 12, 21–3, 31, 36, 71–87 National Film and Sound Archive Australia (NFSA) 2, 76, 91–2 Neighbours 17, 19, 20, 22, 26, 32, 37, 39, 40–4, 71–2, 75, 91, 101 ‘Never Gonna Give You Up’ 62, 79 New Kids On the Block 49 Newton-John, Olivia 2, 15, 19, 21, 42, 77, 91 ‘Nothing Can Divide Us’ 59 Pelman, Amanda 76–8 Pet Shop Boys 29, 86, 92, 96 ‘pooftas’ 25 ­Princess 55, 83 PWL Records 1, 2, 13, 32–3, 62–5, 69, 78–80, 83–7 radio 4, 16–17, 34–5, 59, 71, 76, 95 RAM (Rock Australia Magazine) 24–5 ‘Real Thing, The’ 42 ‘Relax’ 83 Rhianna 58 Richard, Cliff 82 ‘Roadblock’ 55 ‘Say I’m Your Number One’ 55, 83 Schenker, Heinrich 50

‘She Wants to Dance With Me’ 63 ‘sheilas’ 25 ‘Showing Out’ 69 Sivan, Troye 24 Smash Hits 80 Smash Hits Australia 2, 5, 16, 21 ‘So Many Men, So Little Time’ 56 songwriting 50–1, 61–2, 69, 79–80, 84, 86–7 Split Enz 38, 74 ‘Stairway to Heaven’ 58 Stock, Aitken, and Waterman (SAW) 50–1, 64–5, 79, 80–7, 95, 102. See also Stock, Mike and Waterman, Pete Stock, Mike 18–19, 25, 50–1, 61, 80–2, 98 Streisand, Barbra 29 Styles, Harry 12–13, 37 ‘Suddenly’ (wedding theme from Neighbours) 40–1 Sullivans, The 42 Summer, Donna 21, 29, 55, 79 Sydney Morning Herald 3, 5, 21, 39, 43, 59 Sydney Star Observer (SSO) 104, 105

Tagg, Philip 95, 96 ‘Tarzan Boy’ 87 television 3, 31, 37, 41–5, 71, 104 Thomas, Evelyn 56 Top Forty 17, 52, 79, 104 ‘Trapped’ 62 ­‘Turn It Into Love’ 53, 57, 58 ‘Upstroke, The’ 82–3, 97 ‘Venus’ 62 Village People, The 55, 92 Walser, Robert 8, 51, 61, 89 Waterman, Pete 32, 63, 80–1, 83–6 Wiggles, The 45–7 Wizard of Oz, The 27–8, 93 young girls 8–9, 11–13, 18, 19, 31, 34, 36, 78 Young, Johnny 41, 43 Young Talent Time 31, 37, 41–4 ‘Your Disco Needs You’ 92 ‘You Spin Me Round’ 12, 56, 83, 97 ‘You Think You’re A Man’ 12, 56, 57, 97 Youthquake 58

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